Ben Sasse – bucking the Republican establishment

I heard Ben Sasse interviewed on Mark Levin’s radio show before his primary election victory where he won the Republican nomination for Senate in Nebraska, and I was very impressed. Here is a thoughtful, courageous, highly articulate conservative of the caliber of Mike Lee and Ted Cruz.

Mark Levin asked him why the Republican establishment doesn’t like him, and his response was highly instructive. This is what is going on behind the scenes in Washington, and it takes a really careful observer to discern this, and a lot of integrity to confront it. Here is the question and Ben Sasse’s answer:

Mark Levin: Why is the Washington establishment opposed to you?

Ben Sasse: You know, I don’t really understand how they think. When we first decided to do this – I’m a 42-year-old non-politician, most of my career is doing business . . . .

Mark Levin: Well, there it is. That’s the answer. But go right ahead . . . I’m sorry.

Ben Sasse: (Chuckling) I think you might be right. I’ve spent the last five years as a college president in my home town, but I’m a 42-year-old guy who’s running for office because I’m a dad and I think we have a moral obligation to leave a great and free opportunity-filled country to our kids. When I first got in this race, we had some lobbyists come and meet with us and it was strange, like something out of a bizarre bad movie. And these lobbyists said, “You seem like a nice enough guy and relatively articulate, but we want to let you know. We think there’s another guy in your race, because he’s been involved in politics before – he knows how to play the game, he knows how to play ball. And you don’t seem like you would play ball, so we want you to know we’re going to oppose you.” Well, you know, that’s one of the only things the lobbyists and I have ever agreed on, that I wouldn’t play ball, and we’ve faced a bizarre array of national attacks and money from folks who really don’t know Nebraska.

Mark Levin: And I’m going to mention it – you don’t have to – some of this is coming from, unfortunately, the Mitch McConnell wing of the Republican Party, and they’re spending an awful lot of money and time trying to defeat you. And they’re backing this guy, Osborne, who is a very defective candidate and whose conservative credentials are certainly in question. And this is very troubling to me. You know, they go around saying, “There’s a defective candidate, we’ve got to make sure they can win.” They’re trying to drag you down, which would make it more difficult for the Republicans to get this seat.

Yes, Mark, the Republican establishment is telling us that what they want are candidates who can win – and they complain about defective conservative candidates, saying that they are just as conservative as the rest of us, but they simply want candidates who can win. Well, the Nebraska Senate primary put the lie to that. Ben Sasse is eminently electable, so there’s clearly more at play here than that. And Sasse’s comments highlight that. They’re not really interested in electability. That comment plays well – it would be embarrassing for them to say the real reasons for the fight, so they hide those. But it’s clearly the moneyed interests at play here – the big corporations who want the corporate welfare and the illegal immigrant labor and the government regulations that favor the big corporations against the small entrepreneurs. It takes a lot of political courage to buck those interests, but we voters need to be looking for candidates who are willing to do that, if we are to preserve our freedoms.

Here is a link to the audio of this segment:

Ben Sasse, on bucking the Republican establishment.


Click here to visit the Liberty Musings conservative politics home page.

About mesasmiles

By Dr. David Hall. Dr. Hall runs The Website Factory, a digital marketing agency. He has had a long-standing interest in politics. As a college student he was Utah State Chairman for both Young Americans for Freedom and Youth for Nixon, and toyed with the idea of a political career.
This entry was posted in Other Candidates and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.