Conservative pundit Gary Bauer, the former president of the Family Research Council, which puts on the Values Voter Summit each year, told the crowd at the 2012 conference Friday that it needs to turn out in great numbers to defeat President Obama’s army of welfare recipients and fraudulent votes.
After his speech, Bauer told TPM “voter fraud is rampant in urban areas” and he expected that to help Obama.
Bauer also told TPM that “there are a lot of people who will vote this November because they depend on government largesse,” meaning checks from Washington. He expects those voters to go Obama as well.
“They will vote for their own perceived interests, which is they don’t want anybody cutting back the size of the checks,” Bauer said.
On stage at VVS, he made a similar case, but said hard-working Americans will turnout in stronger numbers.
“There’s a lot of people out now around America who depend on checks from their fellow taxpayers being in the mailbox every day,” Bauer said. “They will turn out in massive numbers, but so will the entrepreneurs, the small businessmen and women, the military families, the soldiers in harms way, the millions of Americans that want to hope again.”
That last set of voters, Bauer said, will turn things for Romney.
As for voter fraud, Bauer claimed Republicans will have to contend with lots of fake votes from the big cities. But he said those Obama votes won’t be enough either.
“My prediction is after all the votes are counted — even the dead votes of Democrats in Chicago, Detroit and Cleveland — I predict that we will win, that this nightmare will be over and America will finally be on the road to recovery,” Bauer said.
Bauer was focused on the types of votes he said Democrats rely on, but his talk about people who rely on “government largesse” is not far from the mainstream Republican view of the election. Mitt Romney has said several times that Obama is creating a “culture of dependency” in which more and more people become reliant on government checks.
Bauer on stage at VVS:
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