Paul Broun's comments are already grabbing attention. Ghost of Akin looms over Ga. race

CANTON, Ga. — To his Republican critics, Rep. Paul Broun is 2014’s Todd Akin: a far-right candidate who may win a crowded GOP primary but will blow the party’s chances at holding a critical Senate seat.

But campaigning across Georgia, Broun is modeling himself as the next Sen. Ted Cruz, a conservative firebrand and member of the Senate’s “hell no” caucus — and someone who will constantly give fits to GOP leaders if they even think about compromising.


And conservative voters here are eating it up.

“The establishment don’t want me to go to the U.S. Senate,” Broun told a breakfast gathering of conservative activists here in the northern Atlanta suburbs. “The reason for that is because when I go to the U.S. Senate, it will be Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee and Paul Broun. The establishment don’t want that.”

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Ahead of next spring’s Senate primary to replace retiring Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Republicans in Georgia are faced with the same ideological debate that has loomed over the GOP since the rise of the tea party. Should the party elect the purest conservative in the hopes of pushing Republicans further to the right? Or should they choose a more electable Republican who may stray from conservative orthodoxy in order to get deals through the Senate?

How Georgia’s GOP voters answer those questions will have major implications for control of the Senate and the influence of the tea party wing in the Senate Republican Conference.

Georgia is one of just two GOP seats at risk of falling into Democratic hands in 2014, meaning a win here is essential if Republicans want to net the six seats necessary to win the majority. But what Republicans in Washington and Georgia fear is a repeat of 2010 and 2012: a bloody primary followed by a weak general election candidate who will give away a seat Republicans would otherwise win.

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It’s what happened in Missouri last year, when Akin won his primary on the support of the religious right only to lose handily to Democrat Claire McCaskill in the general election after an uproar over comments on abortion and rape. To avoid that prospect in Georgia, Republicans in Washington are weighing whether to dump big bucks into the primary to prevent Broun from winning if his candidacy picks up steam, according to several sources.

He’s up against other candidates who are trying to sell their conservative credentials.

“This is the time for a senator from Georgia who is not just someone who is mostly conservative but one that stands strongly on those principles of traditional Georgia values — and is not wavering,” Rep. Phil Gingrey, another conservative in the race, told a seniors group at a Japanese restaurant in the southern Atlanta suburb of McDonough.

Broun’s comments are already grabbing attention.

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He says the only immigration bill that needs to pass is one to make “English the official language of the United States.”

A deeply religious Baptist, Broun says he doesn’t vote for legislation if it “does not fit the Judeo-Christian biblical principles that our country was founded on.” And he was caught on tape telling a religious group that evolution, the Big Bang Theory and embryology are all “lies straight from the pit of hell.”

He didn’t walk that back in an interview.

“I’m a Bible-believing Christian,” he told POLITICO. “I understand other people have different beliefs than I do. And I respect those beliefs. We’re not voting on religious beliefs. We are voting on the future of America, and we must all agree that this out-of-control government is destroying the future for our children and our grandchildren.”

To win the wide-open May primary, the Republican candidates are all jostling to make their pitch to voters in rural areas and the heavily conservative Atlanta suburbs — before they have to appeal to a more moderate electorate next November, consisting of a large number of African-American, Hispanic and urban voters.

David Perdue, former chief executive of Dollar General who is also seeking the GOP Senate nomination, warned that the party runs the “risk of losing the seat to a Democratic candidate because we might have the wrong candidate.”

In addition to Broun, Gingrey and Perdue, the crowded field also consists of Jack Kingston, the 11-term congressman from Southern Georgia, and Karen Handel, former Georgia secretary of state. Kelly Loeffler, a wealthy businesswoman who co-owns Atlanta’s WNBA team, is seriously weighing the race and is prepared to spend tens of millions of her own cash, sources say.

As they make their way across the state, Broun and some of his fellow candidates are rejecting the kind of bipartisan deal making that put Chambliss in the middle of key fiscal debates in Congress. Some of his would-be successors are making it plainly clear to voters here that they wouldn’t be another Chambliss, who has grown unpopular with elements of his base for trying to seek bipartisan compromise.

“People here are tired of the wishy-washy, finger-in-the-air conservative,” said Niki Broun, the congressman’s wife of 28 years.

That kind of talk worries some Republicans that the likely Democratic candidate Michelle Nunn — daughter of revered former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn — could find an opening to appeal to moderate and independent voters. Nunn is already angling for Chambliss voters, aligning herself with the GOP senator’s call for military intervention in Syria — even though each of the Republican candidates opposed that course of action.

Chambliss bluntly warned both parties they run a risk if they cater to the extremes.

“I hope nobody is too far to the right — or too far to the left, whichever,” Chambliss said. “You always want to keep your options open.”

In interviews, Perdue, Kingston and Handel all touted their conservative bona fides, but made clear that there are stylistic differences between each of them.

“I think the primary voters look at at [the candidates] and say, ‘OK, everybody up here is conservative,” said Kingston, a Savannah native who faces the challenge of introducing himself to voters in the Atlanta area — home to about half of the state’s population — where he’s not well-known. “Now who has gotten something done? And are we not talking about a style difference?”

“There’s no question I can unify and bring folks on board without bending my philosophy,” Kingston said.

“What I hear from Georgians is what they want is a strong leader who is going to stand up against the status quo, who is not going to be a go-along and get-along individual,” said Handel, who was a senior official at Susan G. Komen for the Cure during a messy public relations battle with Planned Parenthood in 2012.

For Broun to win the primary, he’ll first have to defeat candidates who probably will have far more cash to spend in the expensive Atlanta media market. And he’ll have to worry about Gingrey, who is not conceding much room to Broun’s right, and represents a suburban district just northwest of Atlanta that is heavily populated with Republican voters. Gingrey is trying to project himself as far less polarizing than Broun.

“I’m not an over-the-top bomb-thrower,” Gingrey said in an interview. “And I think if you took an opinion poll of Phil Gingrey in the House of Representatives, all 435, I would like to think at least most people would say, ‘He’s a good guy, but he’s very conservative and sticks to his principles but listens to the other side without being insulting.’”

Indeed, while each of the candidates vows to stick to conservative orthodoxy, Broun’s bombastic style and unflinching ideology put him in a class of his own — something that some rival candidates openly acknowledge.

“There’s no way I’m going to try to be the right of Paul Broun in this election,” said Perdue, who plans to self-finance a significant portion of his campaign and is the cousin of former two-term Gov. Sonny Perdue. “But I’m trying to go to Washington make a difference. That doesn’t mean I’m going to go up there and say ‘no’ to everything.”

Still, it’s Broun’s hard-line conservative positions and his ability to fire up voters that give him a serious shot of winning the primary race.

In a fiery stump speech talking to voters here, he lays out a laundry list of agencies he wants to eliminate — the Labor Department, the Internal Revenue Service, the Education Department, the Federal Reserve, the Energy Department, the Commerce Department, Environmental Protection Agency, to name a few. Broun proudly points out that the first bill he introduced this Congress defined that life begins at fertilization. And he wants to put the country on the gold standard.

Broun boasts about fighting his party’s leadership and frequently voting no even on GOP bills, including on Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s 10-year balanced budget plan that he said was based on faulty assumptions. And he notes he voted for Allen West for House speaker this year — not John Boehner — even though West is no longer a congressman.

Broun, 67, won his House seat in northeastern Georgia in a 2007 special election to replace the late GOP Rep. Charlie Norwood, after three runs for Congress in the 1990s fell short. A family practice physician, Broun also has military credentials, joining the Marines when he was 18 and serving as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy Reserves. He was deployed to Afghanistan last year to treat injured soldiers. In Washington, he lives in his office, showering in the House gym.

Despite positioning himself as an outsider, Broun has long family ties to the Georgia political establishment. His father served for nearly four decades in the Georgia state Senate, and his family struck up a friendship with Jimmy Carter at a time when Democrats dominated the state’s politics.

But in 2002, Republicans swept state races, took the governor’s mansion and Chambliss knocked off incumbent Democrat Max Cleland, helping pave the way for a GOP resurgence in the Southern state. Shifting demographics — namely the growth of Latino voters — are now giving Democrats some hope that the state could once again turn blue, if not in 2014 then in later cycles.

In the interview, Broun dismisses talk that his narrow appeal would fail to win over moderate voters in a general election, insisting that a Democrat won’t win in the state, no matter who the nominee is.

“I appeal to people all across the political spectrum,” Broun said.

But at GOP events here, the makeup of the crowds are largely white and tend to be older. And Broun supporters often are drawn to his staunch opposition to abortion and his devout religious views.

“Pray for me,” Broun tells voters after shaking their hands at a county fair in Lawrenceville.

After meeting Broun, Scott Webb, who works in construction in Athens, said he supported the congressman because he makes sure “our laws are based upon the Bible.”

“He believes in godly principles,” Webb said.