President Barack Obama is a textbook Marxist who is trying to steer the country in that direction, but the American people are not buying it, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay said Thursday on
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum."
"He's as left as you can get, he's one of those radical leftists, we all know that," DeLay said. "He is a Marxist. He was raised by Marxist grandparents, he was raised in that community. He is a Marxist and the left has accelerated since he's been president. That's the bad news. The good news is the American people are seeing it up front and personal and that's why you saw the election in 2010 and you'll see it in this election. The people are starting to reject this leftist progressivism that they know that isn't America, is not constitutional, and they're rejecting it and that's encouraging to me."
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Conservatives need to come together, set an agenda and make sure the United States does not veer off course, said DeLay, who spoke to host J.D. Hayworth about warring factions within the GOP and how the party might unite.
"It just seems to me that that cohesiveness just isn't there," he said. "There's something there that is driving a wedge amongst the Republican members of the conference. The Democrats are very disciplined. I mean they march in lock step. All they care about is making sure that as much as they can that the Republican agenda, whatever it is, is not accomplished."
DeLay noted that holding elected office is a challenging job and was hesitant to offer criticism.
"If I had any criticism at all, it's the lack of an agenda," DeLay said. "We had an agenda every year for the 12 years I was in leadership, one way or another. Every year we started out the year with a list of things that we wanted to accomplish that year and that list was put together by working with the members, we'd go on retreat, and we would propose an agenda, they would add to it, take away from it, but when we started and opened up this House of Representatives, we knew where we wanted to head . . . where we wanted to go that year. Maybe it's just the lack of an agenda, like the "Contract with America."
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He suggested that a second "Contract with America" — the Republicans' agenda in the 1994 congressional campaign that helped win a majority — might be the answer. While there's fierce dissatisfaction with Obama, DeLay said Republicans need something more substantive.
"Yes,
people are very discouraged with Obama and discouraged with the Democrats," he noted. "The right track, wrong track is way against the Democrats and we're going to win. We're going to win seats, we're going to win the Senate, we're going to pick up seats in the House. But what those polls also say is that people are a little discouraged or disgruntled with their current Republicans and it's time for the Republicans to stand up and say, this is who we are, this is what we're for, and maybe another 'Contract with America' would work because the American people, they're going to vote against the Democrats, but if you want to maximize these elections, you want to vote against the Democrats by voting for the Republicans."
He acknowledged opposing ideology among members of the GOP and talked about the party "struggling with itself." A "spiritual revival," he said, might help restore party unity as would a focus on the Constitution, something DeLay said the American people would rally around.
"The Republican Party for the last couple of years has been struggling for its own soul and sometimes that's really good and ultimately it will manifest itself, I hope, into a unified party," DeLay said. "Even within our party we have big government Republicans and constitutional Republicans and I'm hoping that the constitutional Republicans will win in the end."
He also weighed in Thursday on Travis County, Texas, where
Gov. Rick Perry has been indicted on abuse of power for allegedly attempting to force District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg to resign following a drunken driving conviction. Austin, the county seat, is a bastion of liberal politics in an otherwise Red State, he said.
In 2005, DeLay was indicted in the same county, accused of conspiring to break election laws three years earlier in a case that involved charges of money laundering. After a 2011 conviction, the case was overturned on appeal last year after being deemed "legally insufficient."
"Austin, Texas is as liberal a city as San Francisco, if you will," he said. "We call it the People's Republic of Austin. Usually when you find that, you find the left, and it's like an island in Texas. Just as blue as you can get. They had a district attorney that wasn't embarrassed to abuse his office. It wasn't just me — I'm not complaining — but you saw Rick Perry, and he also indicted Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. He even indicted some of his Democrat enemies. He used that office to go after his political enemies.
"But it's bigger than that. The criminalization of politics is a political strategy that the left uses. It's right there in Saul Alinsky's book, 'Rules of a Radical,' where if you can't beat them at the ballot box, you put them in jail, put them in their grave and dance on their grave. It's a working strategy. I can tell you a lot of people that won't run for office because they won't put their family through what I've been through or leaders won't stick their head up because they're scared to death of getting knocked off. It is a concerted, manipulated strategy of politics that we don't use and I'm not advocating that we use it. The left uses it and we allow it to happen."
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