For National Rifle Association president David Keene, the Republican Party is simply a viable vehicle upon which his movement can ride.
“Our movement and the Republican Party are not the same,” Keene clarified as he opened his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday afternoon. He called the Republican Party the path his movement has chosen in order to reach their policy goals.
“The way that party operates and the way it looks at the world is important to us because without it we don’t have a viable vehicle in this point of our history,” Keene said.
Keene, like many other CPAC speakers, heavily criticized the Republican establishment for the reaction to new party members.
Among those criticized, Keene admonished Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for not supporting “hero” Rand Paul and for not wanting the Kentucky Senator to be a member of the Republican Party because of Paul’s appeal to young people.
“Party establishments tend to want voters,” Keene said. “They just don’t want them in their clubs.”
According to Keene, his movement has been about ideals and principles since the very beginning and has attracted anyone with the same values. He speculated that exclusionist policies adopted by the GOP will be the basis for why the party will die instead of grow.
Keene used his CPAC stage to give a brief history of the Republican Party, highlighting conservative trials and former President Ronald Reagan.
“The Republican Party has been left for dead many times over the course of the last few decades and it always seems to come back,” said Keene.
But there is one thing that Republican Party has that the Democratic Party lacks — being right.
“We’re involved in the political arena because of the ideas and values we share,” Keene said. “We’re involved because we know we’re right and they’re wrong.”
Keene said that it is easy for politicians to change their values and ideas if they do not believe in them. However, Republicans do not have that luxury since Republicans have the right values despite differences within the conservative movement. The job for Republicans should be to look at how effectively conservatives are communicating values to people who do not share the same vision or same obsession with politics, said Keene.
Keene speculated that those who oppose Republican values now may eventually join the conservative movement once the message is portrayed in a way that will allow for others to see the error in their thoughts.
According to Keene, if conservatives can welcomingly recruit people who will stand with the Republican Party, then the party will be able to survive, grow and win.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar3hWMe_3Wc]
