Source: Dallas Morning News
It’s too cold in Dallas if one of the city’s newest residents comes to Washington D.C. to escape the north Texas winter.
But that’s what former Florida Rep. Allen West did. At CPAC, the new head of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, said today that it’s “just a little too cold” for him in his new home.
West was elected to the House in the Tea Party wave of 2010, but he lost his first bid for re-election to Democrat Patrick Murphy. That didn’t stop Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tyler, from voting for him in the 2013 Speaker of the House election though.
West has run the conservative think tank since the start of this year. He said he’d been in Washington since Wednesday meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Still a Tea Party favorite, West held court in the hallway outside the CPAC main stage, chatting with reporters and posing for pictures. So consuming was the attention, he said, that he hadn’t had time to see any of the conference’s speakers.
“I’ve been trying to get down there for the past 30 minutes, and I can’t get two steps,” West said.
Without having seen any of them, West didn’t assess how the potential 2016 Republican nominees performed at the conference. But he said that Republican pick for president will likely be “someone who can delineate what the opportunity society is.”
“We want to have economics that lends itself to the opportunity for the American people to be able to take care of themselves, take care of their children,” West said.
He wouldn’t say if Texas’ two potential 2016 candidates, Sen. Ted Cruz and former Gov. Rick Perry, would present such a vision. He did offer them a piece of West family advice, though.
“My mother used to say there’s many a slip between the cup and the lip. And there’s a lot of things that can happen between now and 2016,” West said.