RNC chair Reince Priebus met with bloggers today at CPAC and said he was pleased by the reaction the GOP received from the pro-life movement about his decision to postpone January’s RNC meeting in favor of attending the March for Life. He said the reaction prompted him to want to push to do more to reach out to pro-life voters.
As National Review reports:
RNC chair Reince Priebus sat down with a group of conservative journalists and bloggers this afternoon at CPAC, and he had some interesting things to say about the RNC’s experience with March for Life. The march coincided with the RNC’s annual winter meeting, so Priebus had buses carry attendees who wanted to participate to the march.
“The total appreciation that we got from life groups across the country was a little overwhelming,” Priebus said. “But it was the appreciation that sort of woke me up to say, Why are these folks so appreciative of something that I thought was a pretty easy decision to make?”
The decision seemed simple to him, he continued, but pro-life activists were surprised and pleased by a gesture that shouldn’t really have been surprising.
“So I thought to myself, if these folks are this appreciative of something so simple, maybe we need to start providing people of the core positions of our party more, so we can grow in places we are strong,” he continued. “To me it was sort of a wake-up call.”
At that meeting, the GOP approved a resolution led by RNC Committeewoman Ellen Barrosse of Delaware urging its pro-life candidates to stand their ground against abortion. The resolution urges its candidates to fight back against deceptive “War on Women” attacks by going on offense and exposing pro-abortion Democrats as the real extremists on abortion.
The resolution specifically condemns the strategy of “staying silent” on the issue, as so many Republican candidates have done to their own detriment.
