He’s got a funny-sounding name, but Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus’ relationship with the often cantankerous conservative wing of the GOP is no joke.
Despite having to deal with a financially broke operation and massive divide with Tea Party Republicans, the former Wisconsin GOP boss has pulled off the unexpected: after years of inter-party feuding between the right and moderate elements, Priebus is getting kudos for uniting the party in advance of the presidential election this fall.
“He’s done a good job working broadly with all of us. The RNC hasn’t always done that,” said Grover Norquist, the influential conservative head of Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist tells Secrets that Priebus has wooed conservatives, regularly attended Norquist’s weekly gaggle of activists and taken notes from movement influentials. “He comes, not to lecture, but to listen,” said Norquist.
And considering the financial crisis facing the party and the upstart Tea Party movement that Priebus inherited, Norquist said that “I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had ignored us, but he didn’t.”
For the RNC chief, his strategy wasn’t a grand, premeditated plan to unite the party. He just entered Washington in January 2011 with the same open-door attitude he had in Wisconsin. “His approach is that we are part of the conservative movement, not we ARE the movement. He does not dictate,” said an aide.
Officials add that the party chairman has held multiple meetings with conservatives and Tea Party activists and that the typical election year whining about the party has gone quiet.
Still, he has some work to do with some skeptics such as the Tea Party Patriots, among the nation’s largest. “No one from either party has asked to meet with anyone from Tea Party Patriots, and we are the largest independent grassroots political organization in the United States today,” co-founder Jenny Beth Martin told Secrets. “So much for the Washington based political parties reaching out and engaging the politically active and concerned people of America.”
