Matt Kibbe: Big 2012 Prize Is Conservative Takeover of Senate

The biggest prize for fiscal conservatives in the 2012 elections may not be the presidency but control of the Senate, Matt Kibbe, president and CEO of FreedomWorks, tells Newsmax.TV.

Kibbe, in an exclusive interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, noted that the GOP is not only poised to pick up a majority in the Senate, but conservatives may take control of leadership from establishment Republicans.

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“The biggest prize for fiscal conservatives is how and who wins the Senate in this next cycle because everybody knows, or at least thinks they know, the Republicans can pick up the majority,” he said.

“But what’s more interesting is who those Republicans might be. We just had a leadership fight between, what I would call, more establishment Republicans and the freedom caucus in the U.S. Senate. And the good guy, Sen. (Ron) Johnson, R-Wisc., came up two votes short which means we’re very close to not only taking the Senate for Republicans, but taking the Senate for conservatives.”

Kibbe said balancing the budget was key to the creation of jobs and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts must be addressed.

“Something about the big foot of government on the neck of business has to be dealt with and that’s what we would like to see come out of the House and Senate regardless of who the next president is.” He said.

“All that legislative entrepreneurship could come from the bottom up which is the ethos of the tea party movement. We’re not looking for some leader to solve all our problems for us. What we’re looking for is a leader that’s actually responsive to the people.”

On other issues, Kibbe said:

--President Barack Obama’s shift on the birth control mandate was a “tactical victory” that “proves the point we were making from day one that as long as the government is making decisions about your healthcare, you have to go to Washington to get permission to act on your conscience to do what you think is best for your family to get the healthcare you need. That’s not acceptable in America. We need to repeal the thing.”

--That what is “going on at CPAC is a microcosm of politics in America today. You have this new bottom-up community of activists. And it’s not just the tea party; it’s a very decentralized world where individuals have more power over the system versus the top-down Pooh-Bahs telling us who the nominee was going to be.”

--That the GOP needs to address the issues of the young. “More traditional conservatives need to be careful about how they treat the young Ron Paul-Republicans. There’s been some clash on that. But if you look at what’s happening to the millennial generation in America today, these are the folks that we should be reaching out to first.”