Kracken Party
Tear your enemies asunder!
Posted on 06/27/2014 5:11:48 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that it’s not the tactics themselves that bother them as much as the attention those tactics are receiving from conservative voters.
Says Red State’s Leon Wolf, “If any of these bastards want to avoid the fallout they should go on the record.”
According to these conversations [with two Republican Senate staffers], some $800,000 was raised for Cochran by his Senate colleagues after the McDaniel victory in the primary’s first round, largely under the rubric of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. This wasn’t seen as a particularly controversial matter at the time; the NRSC is an organization by and for the Republican members of the Senate and Cochran had raised money for his colleagues in the past, so there would have been no reason to deny him help. “It’s just what you do,” said one of the staffers. “It’s generally accepted that we probably can’t win the Senate if we lose our own people, so when Cochran’s people ask for help raising money, the answer is yes.”
Though there were published reports to the effect—and Barbour was open about it—that Cochran’s runoff strategy was to “expand the electorate” by seeking Democratic votes in a Republican primary, there wasn’t a lot of attention paid to where the funds being raised would go. And moreover, when Cochran lost a close race to McDaniel in the first round, there was a general assumption that his goose was cooked. “Nobody thought he’d win regardless of what he did,” said the staffer. “If you’re an incumbent and you’re behind a challenger that close to avoiding a runoff, you’re usually behind the eight-ball.”
As such, the staffers say, it wasn’t until Wednesday, when the fallout began to descend, that Cochran’s tactics became an issue. And now, several senators are more than a little uneasy with those tactics, which they feel responsible for since they raised money for Cochran.
AmSpec offers no names but says there’s “soul-searching” going on among “the Senate’s more outspoken conservatives” for not doing more to help McDaniel when they had the chance. *cough* (Rand Paul, of course, seems to think it was just awesome that Cochran won his party’s nomination with votes from the other party.) Was this, though, as Mollie Hemingway thinks, ultimately a pyrrhic victory for the GOP establishment? Before you say yes, tell me what you’re willing to do to punish the party for kitchen-sinking a guy who not only received the most votes in the first round of the primary but who, by wide consensus, won more Republican votes in the runoff too? Withholding donations is fine, but don’t kid yourselves: Money’s the one thing that GOP incumbents and the NRSC don’t want for. If they lose $10 million from the base in boycotted contributions, Sheldon Adelson can make it up for them in one check to the right Super PAC.
Are you willing to go this far?
Should the Republican establishment in Washington get away with tarring its own voters as racists? Should the Republican establishment in Washington get away with comparing its own base to Klansmen?
If there is no penalty for doing so, they will keep doing it. If there is no consequence, they will attack their own base to preserve their power. They will learn no lesson. In fact, some of you may want to donate to Travis Childers, Thad Cochran’s Democrat opponent. I cannot say that I blame you.
Cochran will now put the highest bidders first. The GOP will carry out this tactic of calling you racist klansmen Nazis everywhere it works. I would like to see the GOP get the majority and oust Harry Reid as leader. But I understand if you think Mississippi can still be sacrificed.
All true. If Cochran trounces Childers in the general election, the lesson learned by Republican incumbents will be that there’s no cost to beating conservative challengers by any means necessary. You guys will always turn out for them in November on the theory that the Democrat is worse, no matter how nasty to you they are in the primary, so they might as well be as nasty as they like. The question is, is the Democrat worse this time? He may be worse than Cochran on policy, but is he worse than the filthy patronage system that supports Cochran and which he supports in turn? That’s what you’re voting for, whether you like it or not, if you vote for Thad.
There are risks here. Electing Childers could give the Democrats the 50th Senate seat they need in the fall to preserve their majority. (Biden would cast the deciding vote in case of 50/50 ties, of course.) That’s not a big risk on legislation given that Republicans will control the House but it’s a huge risk on Supreme Court nominations, if/when Harry Reid ends up nuking the filibuster and allowing confirmation by simple majority vote. If O knows he can get a nominee through with just 51 votes, he’ll feel safer nominating someone who’s further left. Also, the more seats you hand to Democrats now, the better position they’ll be in come 2016, when they’re expected to clean up in battleground states. Sean Trende thinks there’s even a (small) chance that Democrats will win a filibuster-proof majority. If you sacrifice Mississippi now, you’re making that marginally more likely.
The counterargument is simple, though: If not now, when? The GOP might do well enough in the fall to retake the Senate even if they lose Mississippi. If they don’t retake it, that’s not a disaster — this is, by Nate Silver’s estimate, the “least important election in years” because control of the upper chamber matters so little. The GOP will have more leverage over Court confirmations if they have a majority, but who knows if there’ll even be a vacancy on the Court? And gridlock on legislation is a fait accompli given Obama’s standoff with the Republican House regardless of what the Senate does. If you’re unwilling to risk a protest vote for a Democrat after the grotesque spectacle of a group of GOP cronies using liberal votes to prop up an elderly man whose heart isn’t in it anymore, you’ll never be willing. And if you’re unwilling, maybe it’s time to stop complaining about Cochran and cronyism and the rest of it and accept that this is who we are and who we’re going to be.
Let loose the Kraken Party!
In an open primary state, if the parties didn’t want the potential for crossover, they’d close the primaries.
Most states with open primaries keep them open specifically to allow crossover voting. There can’t be any other reason.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
What McDaniel is fighting right now are the ILLEGAL votes that were cast by people voting in the dem primary on the 3rd that voted ILLEGALLY again in the republican primary on the 24th.
The rest of us are kvetching about the WAY these voters were encouraged to cross over.
Tear your enemies asunder!
I was just saying on another thread, I see some common ground. I get stuff on facebook from extreme rightys and extreme leftys and it’s the same stuff.
OK, on many issues there will never be common ground. But on a lot of other issues there is.
It’s very hard to look at a person like Cochran and his string pullers and not see that they are only in it for the money. Heck, they said it right out.
And from when does that money come? From me g-damnit.
I don’t know, but we can’t continue on the way we’ve been going.
These republicans don’t like us, they think the Mexicans will vote for them, they are so delusional they make Obama and Pelosi and Reid look grounded.
They may as well just shove Amensty through, because I don’t think I’m voting for them again. And I’m a 3rd generation Republican. I stuck with them because of the Life issues, but please, if you are going to say I’m in the KKK, I’m going to tell you to go you-know-what yourself.
It's not just wrong when you do it to your own kind, it's wrong, period. It is also a wonderful argument for closed primaries, but that is another discussion.
a) the GOP establishment disenfranchising its own base by setting up an election such that Dems would override the votes of rank and file part members in favor of a senile progressive.
Which was wrong. I can't put it any more plainly.
b) the GOP establishment smearing its own base as racists for the purpose of recruiting Dem voters to override the votes of its own base get an old senile progressive chased as the party candidate.
Not right, but something similar happens after every single convention and after most primaries, when the candidate moves to the center. They end up trashing at least part of the base.
The electoral math in many states means that the candidate knows they are going to shed some of their own in favor of crossovers if they plan to win. This is a huge part of what has been wrong with the state of the GOP for as long as I can remember. It makes voters distrustful, and for good reason. They turn on their base like vipers.
What Cochran and Co. did was wrong but unfortunately not unexpected.
c) the GOP establishment destroying a promising, up and coming candidate who has been a loyal party member since he was 13.
I don't see how he is destroyed by this. He'll live to run again regardless of what happens in this instance. It doesn't look like he did anything wrong, illegal, or shameful.
Also, I don't know how you define "party member", but I assure you he didn't register to vote until he turned 18. I campaigned for Ronald Reagan when I was a child before he was elected. I wasn't a party member until the day after I turned 18, when I registered to vote. President Reagan was already in office by then.
Maybe Childers just wanted to represent his district.
It's stunning how "conservative" Pubs get elected from conservative districts and states and then "evolve" into establishment types. Fool me once shame on them. Fool me twice shame on me.
Agreed.
Assuming that Childers would want to keep his seat once won, he could not deviate from his conservatism too much.
I have no illusions, though, about politicians. I do not consider Childers a white knight. He’s just in the right place at the right time to foil the establishment treachery.
I think it was probably Barasso or someone like that who feels bad. Maybe Thune. Maybe Shelby. The Alabama GOP is looking at closing its primaries.
Maybe Shelby. Shelby is an idiot for donating to Thad. He doesn’t need the money. He needs a conservative record.
Secondly, with Republicans in control of the Senate, Alabama’s junior U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions would become the chairman of the Budget Committee, which sets the federal government’s spending levels. So there is a very realistic scenario in which one Alabama senator (Sessions) would set the spending amount, and the other Alabama senator (Shelby) would lead the debate on where that amount of money is spent.
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