In a wide-ranging interview with The Daily Caller, longtime conservative activist Richard Viguerie offered his advice to grassroots conservatives.
“I say to my conservative friends: Once, twice, three times a day, Obama is going to do something that is going to anger you, upset you, frustrate you and that’s ok,” Viguerie, a pioneer of political direct mail, said. “Take 30, maximum 40 seconds to cuss, throw something, you know, get upset but then get down on your knees and thank God that he’s President of the United States because I know of no other way to save America.”
In Viguerie’s opinion the creeping expansion of government under President George W. Bush was something that was largely ignored by the right and by the country at large because it happened so gradually.
“As long as we were losing our freedoms slowly, we were going to lose them, guaranteed,” he explained. “It might take 20 years, might take 30 years but we were going to lose America.”
Viguerie goes on to explain that, in his view, it was the election of President Obama and his rapid and relentless pursuit of “fundamental change” that awoke people to the direction of politics in the country and spurred the tea party into action.
Viguerie’s history on the conservative right stretches back to the formation of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) at Sharon, Connecticut in 1960 with William F. Buckley.
After becoming the YAF executive director in 1961, Vigurerie began a steady climb through the movement with the aim of becoming the best marketer of conservative ideas in America. This path has culminated in his company American Target Advertising and his website Conservative HQ.
As one of the founders of the modern American conservative movement, Viguerie has seen it grow over the last 50 years and has harsh words for Republicans.
“Under the Nixons of the world, the Fords, the Bob Doles, the John McCains, the Mitt Romneys, the Denny Hasterts, the Bill Frists, the John Boehners, Mitch McConnells, we are going to lose our country,” he said.
Viguerie says he admires the “boat rocking” of Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Speaking warmly about the freshman senator, Viguerie said, “we need a lot more Ted Cruzes. Ted Cruz is such a breath of fresh air and is exactly the type of candidate, elected official that is a boat rocker and could change America.”
Despite turning 80 years old this month — or as he claims, “celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of my fiftieth birthday” — Viguerie is still hard at work. He works 12 to 14 hours a day, five and a half days a week, managing his staff of more than 70, servicing his multitude of clients and curating his mailing lists that number in the millions.
Responding to the friction between grassroots conservatives and so-called establishment Republicans, Viguerie has blunt criticism for the latter group.
“I say to Karl Rove: We’ve done it his way. The only real big victories that conservatives have had, and there have been four of them in the last fifty years, all of them have been conservative victories.”
See the first segment of TheDC’s interview in which Viguerie asks why is Mitch McConnell hiding behind John McCain and Lindsey Graham?