In the crowded seven-person field for the GOP Senate nomination, you need to stand out. Paul Broun, the congressman from Athens, wants to stand out as the most conservative person in the field.
“Here are the three words that will tell you who I am: conservative, constitutionalist and Christian,” Broun told a small crowd — most of them senior citizens — in a campaign appearance Tuesday evening in DeKalb County. He also quickly dismissed the electoral chances of Michelle Nunn, the likely Democratic nominee, whom he described as “a community organizer from Atlanta.”
“The way the dynamics of this cycle are, the Democrats cannot win,” Broun said. “I don’t think even her dad could win this race. A Democrat cannot win. So we’re going to elect a Republican. And the Republicans are going to nominate the most conservative Republican. That would be me.”
That’s a critical point for Broun’s candidacy. Here in Georgia and in Washington as well, the nomination of the combative Broun is perceived as the best chance the Democrats have for taking the seat now held by Saxby Chambliss. And while it’s early in the campaign, Broun was already honing conservative applause lines for about any topic thrown at him.
Taxes? “Ten percent is good enough for the Lord, so it ought to be good enough for Uncle Sam.”
Abortion? “Planned Parenthood wants to continue abortion all the way up to the second that the head pops out, that the whole baby pops out. They want to be able to kill these unborn children all the way up to the end.”
Education? “I say let’s close down the Department of Education totally…. Let’s stop the Department of Education from giving us No Child Left Behind and now Common Core, which is going to be disastrous.”
Broun also cast himself as a populist, taking the side of “the little people” against what he called “the ruling elite” of both parties. In fact, at times he almost sounded so populist as to be liberal.
“We have enough money in this country to take care of poor people, and we must!” he told his listeners. “We have enough money in this country to take care of senior citizens that are on limited income and need some help. We absolutely must do that. We have enough money to provide good, quality health care for ALL Americans. And we absolutely should. We must! We have enough money in this country to provide a world-class education to every child.”
Earlier, he had used that same rhetorical device in discussing his plan to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency.
“We’ve got be good stewards of our environment. There’s no question. We must! But we should not be spending billions of dollars on an EPA up in Washington that’s hurting our economy and that’s killing jobs today and that’s driving up the cost of energy. Our state can do that.”
So, how do you slash taxes by more than half and still have money to provide health care for all, education for all and also take care of senior citizens?
“The problem is when we’ve built a major bureaucracy in Washington and pay those fatcat bureaucrats these huge salaries. They take money from those who have the greatest need, poor people and the senior citizens on limited incomes. We need to put the money where it needs to be instead of a bigger bureaucracy. The federal government is destroying everything that this country was made on.”
In other words, if you gauge a person’s conservativism by their devotion to the belief that we can slash government in half yet somehow not harm popular and important programs, then yes, Paul Broun might be the most conservative person in the field.
