Conservatives war with GOP consultants at CPAC

In an interview with NRO, Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, blasted the professional political class, decrying “any consultant who thinks that they can come into a state and say, ‘this is who you need to have as your representative and we’re going to make sure that person is elected.’”

“That is the antithesis of what we’ve been talking about in this whole entire movement,” she said. “We want limited government. That means we don’t want Washington, D.C., making laws that limit how we live our lives, and we sure don’t want people from Washington, D.C. – consultants — telling us who are going to represent us.”…

But Jeff Roe, a Missouri-based GOP strategist, argued that, while the quality of consultants varies, the professionals do serve a valuable function. For candidates such as Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz, with very little to no political experience, consultants served as the “equalizer[s]”, employees who could keep a rookie candidate from making fatal mistakes against an experienced opponent.

Roe did rail against politicians who hire consultants with a record of losing. But that, he said, was a “candidate problem.”