Jonathan Strong:
Former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele hit back at Republicans sniping at his record when trying to defend the campaign committee’s relatively minor financial involvement in the Cuccinelli campaign and said the D.C. GOP treated the Virginia campaign as a neglected “step child.”
“The establishment types didn’t like the Cuccinelli campaign, didn’t back the Cuccinelli campaign — for whatever their reasons were. Whether it was his hot social-conservative rhetoric from the past, whether it was the way the campaign was structured presently, I don’t know,” Steele says. ”I know I tried to raise some money for him and ran into all kinds of resistance from folks and excuses.”
“People were clearly behind the Christie effort. In a lot of respects, Cuccinelli was the step child. He was the one that people made excuses not to support . . . I think there was a conscious decision to sacrifice Virginia,” he adds.
The Establishment Republicans are trying to consolidate the party under their thumb of control. They want to purge the party of office holders who represent their constituents, and turn it into a country-club party where only those sanctioned by the elitists will hold office (and only so long as they toe the oligarchical line).
In other words they, like the Democrats, want to centralize power and leadership under the Washington DC establishment.