Posted on 03/17/2014 12:22:23 PM PDT by Bratch
Via Mark Hemingway. Won’t these guys ever learn?
This brings us to the May 13 primary for the open Senate seat in Nebraska, where the NRSC’s meddling is particularly hard to justify. The two top Republicans are Ben Sasse and Shane Osborn. Both men are impressive. Sasse is a fifth-generation Nebraskan and Yale Ph.D. He worked for Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey & Company, specializing in crisis management and turnaround projects. Just after 9/11, he worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy. Later in the Bush administration, Sasse was an assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, where he worked on initiatives to rein in entitlement spending and modernize health care, and acquired a reputation as a formidable health policy expert. He moved back to his hometown of Fremont, Nebraska, to become president of Midland College. In the last four years, Sasse rescued the college from bankruptcy, gained national attention for his tenure reforms, and doubled the college’s enrollment…
Yet there’s little doubt who the NRSC’s preferred candidate is. If you guessed it’s the former Bush administration official, endorsed by the likes of former vice presidential candidates Sarah Palin and Rep. Paul Ryan and Senators Tom Coburn and Mike Lee, you’d be wrong. “Looking at their records and their rhetoric, you wouldn’t be able to tell which is the candidate of the Tea Party and which is the candidate of K Street and the GOP establishment,” reportedWashington Examiner columnist Tim Carney in January. “But their donor lists make it crystal clear. The Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund are backing Sasse. Perhaps for that reason, K Street and the GOP establishment are bankrolling Osborn.”
Officially, the NRSC is neutral. “As far as I’m aware and have seen, the NRSC isn’t taking sides in Nebraska,” Walsh tells The Weekly Standard. “Both Osborn and Sasse have used the NRSC to host fundraisers.” That’s a bit of a red herring. Providing space for a fundraiser isn’t nearly as important as who the NRSC brings to it. In the case of Shane Osborn, some of the biggest Republican-friendly names on K Street keep showing up on his guest lists. Billy Piper, McConnell’s former chief of staff and current UnitedHealth lobbyist, has been raising money for Osborn. Carney further reports that medical device lobbyists canceled a Sasse fundraiser for fear of alienating Republican Senate leadership. “It’s no secret that Mitch McConnell and the NRSC are working behind the scenes to defeat Ben Sasse in Nebraska,” says SCF executive director Matt Hoskins…
So why is the NRSC pulling the purse strings in a race where there isn’t even an incumbent, much less a classic insider-outsider divide? Sasse has used his health policy expertise to run hard against Obamacare, and Hoskins speculates, “McConnell was upset that Sasse called for stronger Republican leadership to stop Obamacare.” However, McConnell’s search-and-destroy mission against SCF-endorsed candidates might have more to do with Hoskins than Sasse. Hoskins was the chief of staff for former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint. For years, Senate Kremlinologists noted a litany of cloakroom-and-dagger operations prompted by DeMint and McConnell’s long-simmering feud. Since leaving the Senate, DeMint has used his position as head of the powerful Heritage Foundation in ways that have irked Senate Republicans.
Governor Palin endorsed Ben Sasse last Thursday. By going to his website and donating to his campaign, you can demonstrate your support for both Mr. Sasse and the Governor while simultaneously registering your contempt for the GOP establishment and their petty inside baseball crap. That’s a win-win as far as I’m concerned. I understand that the NRSC is an incumbent protection entity, but you’d think they would have learned their lesson with Charlie Crist. This is not to say that Osborn is as bad as Crist, but the fact remains that there’s no incumbent in this race and, thus, no role for the NRSC and their K Street cronies to play in the primary.
Update: Be sure to read Stacy’s post chronicling the efforts of the Democrat website, Politico, to smear Ben Sasse by trotting out an old and discredited story and passing it off as "news".
Time for John Cornyn’s feet to be held to the fire. He has a record of screwing over Tea Party candidates.
“Won’t these guys ever learn?”
No.
The time to do that was in the Primary.
Both Sasse and Osborn are good men.
I’m done with Generic Republican RINOs, especially ones that are supported by the GOPe over conservatives.
I’m canning my Congressman this year because of his vote with Ryan on his capitulation debt limit vote, and for siding with Lewis and Johnson here in Georgia. Unforgivable.
See my tag line why the GOP-e favors Osborn.
To a certain extent, that happened. Cornyn drew 58% of the vote, employing a campaign war chest that dwarfed the combined resources of his opponents.
Admittedly, it wasn't enough, and I think that Cornyn will now cruise to re-election.
TEA Partiers need to figure out a way to keep kooks like Stockman from sucking the air out of the process. I may have to revise my tagline (lol).
I hear you, Gaffer. I feel the same way. GOPe incumbents have proven themselves to be just as culpable on the growing debt as the Democrats. Cornyn's vote proved that by voting to end debate on the debt ceiling increase. IMHO, THAT was the vote that gave Obama the blank check through March 2015. Yet his commercials said he voted against raising the debt limit. Technically true, but totally hypocritical.
the same day they announce that they’re staying out of the primaries.
Pricks. (can I say that?)
My congressman called that vote “resisting” Yeah, the part where he voted no in a plurality vote when he could have held fast on the Cloture vote. He’s an effing coward and I’ll be damned if I vote for him.
It’s the power. It corrupts.
NE usualy picks the wrong one; Cornhuskers get it wrong, but maybe Sasse can surprise us. Their last two good senators were Curtis and Hruska; none since those two have been that good.
No, probably not. Our state GOP party twits supported UpChuck Hagel to the bitter end; when it became obvious that the voters wanted him out. Some of them even quietly supported Ben Nelson over conservative candidates. They keep pushing Osborn as a “hero” for doing his job when he let Chinese fighters get too close to his plane and bump him, thus forcing him to land in Chinese territory. They were held for about a week and then let go, nothing extraordinary. Osborn seems to be a lackluster party apparatchik who will do and go where he is told.
I would have to agree; I’m still for Sasse unless he says or does something very very dumb. His commercials are a bit wimpy but overall he looks pretty good.
On the downside, Hagel looked pretty good the first time he ran as well but at that time there wasn’t the obvious split between conservative voters and the state GOP.
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