the gop. karl rove launched the conservative victory project to get involved in primaries to make sure that the party doesn t inhe primary nominate somebody who can t win a general election. do you think that is a mistake? elections are free marketplace and everybody has a right to participate in primary elections. i would say primary elections need to not be selected by the party in my case and also in senator rubio s case the party chose someone else and in senator rubio s case chose someone who is now a democrat. it wasn t a good choice. let s have healthy primaries. if people want to contribute on all sides let people make voluntary contributions and you will see how it goes. i think primaries you get a good candidate typically. chris: let s turn to the president s agenda. what is wrong with the idea that the president laid out in the state of the union that yes at this time particularly when we have a weak recovery we need to spend more money he calls it
they don t step aside and allow a robust normal primary to emerge. chris: bob, what does is say about the republican party when you have karl rove stepping in to say we have to police who the republican primary voters. it is part of the process, i m not saying there is anything wrong with it and let me just finish the question and when you have marco rubio who is conservative and a tea party favorite giving the republican response and the tea party thinks they have to somebody else give a response to the response? my last book is going to be called some people never go away and karl is going to get his own chapter because he never goes away. i m sorry. maybe two chapters because you never know what the next bounce will be with you. but what is interesting is the focus on money. i think the problem in the republican party is really not money. i think they have got lots of it. i think it is theory of the case. why are we here.
we have so have the main focus on the spending problem. the question is how the white house decides to implement this and whether or not they will play really big games jess the temptation for the white house is going to be there is some latitude in how to put the cuts into effect and do them in a way that doesn t hurt as much. their temptation is to make it as painful as possible. school districts do that always cut the fine arts programs or the school busing to make the parents want to cough up the money. chris: the white house put out thousands of kids thrown out of head start. we won t have food safety inspectors. all kinds of dire things. small business won t get any kind of loan guarantees. they are saying we will make it hurt. oh, yeah, and i think the news media will play into that at everly level. the big ticket here is you are cutting jobs and millions of jobs around the country and you are damaging the economy. so stupid as bob said is a good word for it. it is taking a
i will think he is flat out wrong. chris: but does it matter whether it is right or wrong and you know this doesn t have anything to do with politics, as a matter of practical politics isn t the president putting the republican party in the same spot he is successfully put you in during the campaign. he is defending the middle class and you guys are protecting tax breaks for the wealthy. right. and that is empty and false rhetoric. it is our job to explain to the american people that big government doesn t help the poor. big government creates massive debt which causes your price to rise. your gas price going up if you make $20,000 a year and have two kids you are poor and when the gas prices go from $3.20 to $3.0 that is president obama doing that with big government and his debt. if you are a senior citizen trying to save money and you get no cost of living increase that is president obama doing that to your prices because his massive debt causes prices to rise.
fundamentally the debt that we have at the moment is the bigger problem for the economy and job creation in the private sector. chris: let me binge karl in to talk about the sequester and look at the president s state of the union speech and agenda he laid out and what does that tell us about what he wants to do in his second term? spend a lot of money and pursue a lot of liberal social policies and says he is out of touch with the reality of where the country is. the democrats said we don t have a spending problem. 83% of the american people say we have a pending problem. i agree with kim. $85 billion cut is a 2.4% cut roughly out of this year s budget. it is a chunk. but a lot of families have had to cut deeper and it is an $85 billion cut in government spending when we have a $16 trillion economy. the administration is right to say there will be some problems with across-the-board hair cuts. that is why the republicans in the house have been talking about in the in the conti