Norquist: Mosque Issue Hurts GOP
Republican strategist Grover Norquist has taken a slightly unexpected stance. He argues that campaigning against the Cordoba Institute is actually a bad electoral strategy for Republicans:
In my conversation with ATR's Grover Norquist, he made the counter-intuitive argument that "Republicans will lose Jewish votes by focusing on a mosque in New York."
"You're not just going to lose Muslim votes," said Norquist, who has long argued that Republicans should win those voters. "You're going to lose Jewish votes, Indian votes, Buddhist votes. Every member of a minority group looks at a situation like this and says, oh, the people hitting this minority will eventually start hitting me."
Norquist dismissively referred the the mosque controversy as a "shiny object," saying that it, and the Arizona immigration law, would distract Republicans from the winning issues of the economy and the Obama record and give Democrats outs, by handing them wedge issues to oppose the administration on. (We talked before Harry Reid came out against building the mosque near ground zero.)
"It's a 70-30 issue that any Democrat can jump on the 70 percent side of," said Norquist.
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