Shadegg warns House GOP newcomers: Don’t ‘betray’ grassroots like we did

If the Tea Party movement had come along four years ago, John Shadegg might now be the incoming Speaker of the House.

The Arizona Republican ran for majority leader in 2006 but was beaten by John Boehner, the Ohio Republican who has been minority leader since the fall of 2006 and is now set to take the gavel from Democrat Nancy Pelosi in one week’s time.

Shadegg, who in 2006 was the choice of National Review magazine and the conservative blog Redstate, is going home to Arizona. He decided to retire after 16 years in office.

Shadegg, 61, has a unique perspective on conservative Republican politics. He came to Washington as part of the Republican Revolution of 1994 that swept the GOP into control of the House for the first time since 1954.

He also has a connection to the first 20th century wave of conservatism. Shadegg’s father, Stephen Shadegg, was a close aide and political adviser to former Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964. Stephen Shadegg ran Goldwater’s 1952 and 1958 Senate campaigns, but played a lesser role in Goldwater’s presidential run.

The Daily Caller sat down with Shadegg recently to glean any clues on how the Tea Party is different than past conservative waves.

Shadegg talked at length about the fact that the new Republican majority in the House is “on probation,” and said the reason that there is no leader of the Tea Party is because grassroots conservatives are gun shy after being “betrayed” by the House Republicans who took office in 1994.

“When the Gingrich revolution happened, the Gingrich revolution collapsed. It had betrayed its supporters,” Shadegg said. “So now I think there’s a reticence for a movement to arise under the Tea Party with a leader because nobody trusts a leader.”

Below is a partial transcript of the interview:

TheDC: Your father was involved with Goldwater – what’s similar between then and now in your mind?

REP. JOHN SHADEGG: Well, let me just make some comments. If my dad were alive and sitting here today, he would tell you that John Kennedy’s assassination essentially ended the Goldwater campaign. He wrote a book called “What Happened to Goldwater?” Basically, I think Sen. Goldwater concluded, many thoughtful conservatives concluded, and my dad concluded, that the nation was not going to change presidents three times in the span of less than a year. So when Kennedy was assassinated and Johnson became president, while Goldwater could not not run, they knew they weren’t going to win. And I think there’s a fair amount in “What happened to Goldwater?” about the fact that Barry was looking forward to running against John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was a philosophical liberal of the day, and Goldwater was the conservative, and they were admired and respected each other. And I think they thought they were going to have substantive debates. I think there were actually even preliminary discussions, at least I had heard there were preliminary discussions – this is probably in the book and I’ve just forgotten it – of them taking the same plane and going to places and debating, Goldwater and Kennedy. So when Kennedy was assassinated, although the movement went forward and the campaign went forward, the tone and the tenor of everything changed dramatically and there was a belief that it wasn’t going to be a debate on the issues, which they had thought was going to occur with Kennedy. As for the parallels,…