Rove’s Plan To Shape GOP Primaries Turns Into Personal Fight

Photo Credit: Spencer PlattKarl Rove’s plan to prevent people he views as “lousy candidates” from winning Republican primaries has taken a turn for the personal. This morning, a spokesman for Rove’s Conservative Victory Project labeled the Media Research Center’s Brent Bozell “a hater” in response to Bozell’s description of Rove’s allies as “fake conservatives.”

“Bozell is a hater and he also has a long, sordid history hating Karl Rove too,” Conservative Victory Project (CVP) spokesman Jonathan Collegio, who previously worked for Crossroads GPS, said this morning on WMAL. “He has weird, personal axes to grind.”

Bozell had criticized CVP as an attempt by moderate Republicans to stamp out Tea Party conservatives. “We don’t need a second Democrat Party in Washington,” he said in a statement this week. “These fake conservatives need to go away before they do more damage.” He also noted that “if we had listened to them, there would be no Pat Toomey, no Marco Rubio, no Mike Lee, no Rand Paul, and no Ted Cruz in the Senate today.”

Earlier in the WMAL interview, Collegio explained that “what we can’t do is push these lousy candidates over the finish line — and that goes for Tea Party candidates, but it also goes for the so-called establishment candidates. We need better candidates across the board.”

Rove’s American Crossroads and GPS groups enjoyed some success helping Republicans in 2010, but their millions spent came to naught in 2012. This new initiative marks the first time his groups have openly become involved in Republican primaries.

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