Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican whose name has been mentioned as a potential Senate contender, argued today at CPAC that Republicans can’t win by only talking economic issues.
“I stood on life, and I stood on marriage, and the thing that a bunch of people have been backing away from a bunch of these challenges don’t seem to realize is I’m still standing,” King said, talking about his congressional election last year against Christie Vilsack, wife of former Iowa governor and secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack.
“I didn’t run a campaign on jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy, and beat that drum until I beat people into sleep,” he added. “That’s part of it, all right, but all the rest of this has to be added together or we can never reconstruct this country.”
Talking about immigration, King reflected sadly on how Ronald Reagan had dealt with the issue.
“Ronald Reagan only let me down a couple of times in eight years,” King remarked. “One of those was 1986. And I still have the dent on my filing cabinet,” King added, noting he’d kicked it “after I had heard the news that he had signed the amnesty act in 1986.”