Posted on 11/03/2010 7:06:56 PM PDT by Qbert
Long-simmering tensions within the Republican Party spilled into public view Wednesday as the pragmatic and conservative wings of the GOP blamed each other in blunt terms for the party’s failure to capture the Senate.
With tea party-backed candidates going down in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada, depriving Republicans of what would have been a 50-50 Senate, a bloc of prominent senators and operatives said party purists like Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had foolishly pushed nominees too conservative to win in politically competitive states.
Movement conservatives pointed the finger right back at the establishment, accusing the National Republican Senatorial Committee of squandering millions on a California race that wasn’t close at the expense of offering additional aid in places like Colorado, Nevada and Washington state, where Democratic Sen. Patty Murray holds a narrow lead as the votes continue to be counted.
The back-and-forth following an otherwise triumphant election amounted to a significant ratcheting up of the internecine battle that has been taking place within the GOP for the past year.
“Candidates matter,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). “It was a good night for Republicans but it could have been a better one. We left some on the table.”
Referring to the debate within the right about whether the party was better off losing the Delaware seat than winning with a moderate Republican like Rep. Mike Castle, who lost the GOP primary to Christine O’Donnell, Graham was even more blunt.
“If you think what happened in Delaware is ‘a win’ for the Republican Party then we don’t have a snowball’s chance to win the White House,” he said. “If you think Delaware was a wake-up call for Republicans than we have shot at doing well for a long time.”
Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott put it plainly: “We did not nominate our strongest candidates.”
Had Republicans run Castle in Delaware and establishment favorites Sue Lowden in Nevada and Jane Norton in Colorado, Lott said, Tuesday would have turned out different.
“With those three we would have won and been sitting at 50 [senators],” he observed.
Another high-profile senator went even further, placing the blame for the Senate GOP’s failure squarely at the feet of Graham’s South Carolina colleague, DeMint.
This Republican senator said that the tea party was the “big winner” by helping bring enormous energy behind GOP candidates Tuesday, but he said that “Sen. DeMint was the big loser.”
“It’s like you’re on the five-yard line ready to score and the quarterback calls the play and some member of your team tackles one of your members and keeps you from scoring,” the senator said. “We came tantalizingly close to a majority.”
“I’m completely mystified by it,” the senator said of DeMint’s tactics.
The senator credited House Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner for keeping House Republicans unified behind a common purpose but he said that DeMint took a selfish path that hurt the party’s common cause.
“In the Senate, we had one senator, with almost no following within the caucus, engaged in DeMint-style tactics and kept us from realizing our potential,” the senator said.
The South Carolina conservative endorsed O’Donnell and Buck in the primary but only got behind Angle after she won the nomination. All told, he raised over $7 million for GOP candidates, more than any other senator.
DeMint aides declined to make the senator available for an interview, but depicted Republican leaders as accommodationists while touting the senators who won that they endorsed.
“We’re very proud of the conservative leaders who won their races yesterday,” said Matt Hoskins, a DeMint aide. “Many of these candidates were initially opposed by the Washington establishment yet they prevailed because they had the courage to stand up for conservative principles. At least five new Republicans will be in the Senate next year who will hold Washington accountable by standing up to the big spenders in both political parties.”
DeMint got behind newly-elected GOP senators Pat Toomey (Penn.), Marco Rubio (Fla.), Rand Paul (Ky.), Mike Lee (Utah) and Ron Johnson (Wisc.) in primaries even as party officials had varying degrees of skepticism about their general election prospects.
Sources close to DeMint also sought to rebut the criticism they’re taking for their role in pushing conservative candidates by pinning the blame instead on the NRSC’s spending decisions.
“If the establishment is doing finger-pointing this morning it’s because their $8 million gamble in California didn’t pay off,” jabbed a source close to DeMint. “That money could have been used in Colorado, Nevada, Washington and Alaska where the races were much looser and much more winnable. That was a huge fumble.”
Republican Carly Fiorina lost by about 10 percentage points to Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in California.
NRSC Chairman John Cornyn, while declining to publicly criticize DeMint, defended the decision to spend money in the Golden State, saying she was the best Republican candidate the party could have fielded in a good year for the GOP. “But in deep-blue California that wasn’t quite enough,” Cornyn said on a conference call with reporters, noting that Democrats also spent considerable sums trying to snatch such long-shots as Missouri and Kentucky from Republicans.
As for Colorado, Cornyn came prepared, noting that the committee had spent $6.2 million there. In the case of Nevada, he pointed out that Angle raised record sums for her own bid. An NRSC official noted that the third-party group American Crossroads put in considerable sums into both states.
DeMint’s actions have enraged many Republican senators, aides and consultants, many of whom were exchanging cutting emails about him late Tuesday and early Wednesday as it became clear the party would fall short in the Senate.
“I’m glad Jim DeMint is serving as the loyal opposition within our party,” quipped Julie Wadler, a GOP fundraiser and strategist, capturing the contempt held by many Beltway Republicans for the South Carolinian.
But the blame over who lost the Senate isn’t just taking place within Washington. It’s now the turf on which a more fundamental debate within the conservative movement is taking place. It’s a familiar purity vs. pragmatism battle that has been raging since the GOP lost its majority status in the Senate.
Rush Limbaugh, taking issue with a statement Karl Rove made Tuesday night about the “lesson” learned in nominating O’Donnell, argued that both Angle and O’Donnell lost because they were abandoned by party elites.
“Christine O'Donnell could have won were it not for all the backbiting after her primary victory,” Limbaugh said on his radio show Wednesday. “Had the party gotten behind her, had [RNC Chairman Michael] Steele had some on-the-ground money for Nevada, who knows how that might have turned out. We didn't have any money on the ground in Nevada.”
Both O’Donnell and Angle actually raised significant sums of money and the latter got millions of dollars in assistance from third-party conservative groups, including cash that went to voter turnout efforts.
Mike Duncan, the former RNC Chairman who heads American Crossroads, noted that his well-funded organization spent millions on Angle, Paul and Buck.
But, citing his fellow Kentuckian’s triumph, Duncan said: “Obviously some candidates are more skilled than other candidates.”
Graham said the problem with such candidates was not that they didn’t get enough financial assistance, but that they ran campaigns outside the mainstream of states that favor candidates closer to the political middle.
“Hard-right politicians in purple states didn’t turn out very well,” he said. “Candidates who embraced center-right politics in purple states did very well.
Crowing about the large group of more mainline Republicans coming into the Senate such as Ohio’s Rob Portman and Illinois’s Mark Kirk, Graham said: “The solving-the-problem crowd in the Senate grew on Tuesday.”
Other Senate Republicans who bridge the two wings of the party sought to tamp down the anger Wednesday.
“We didn’t have the “A” candidates for this election, but how many election cycles do you have that?” asked Sen. Richard Burr (N.C.). “You got to play the hand you’re dealt.”
Still, even with the election over now, there is little doubt that the fight within the party will continue. Now joined by the likes of Lee and Paul, DeMint is likely to be emboldened to continue his guerilla tactics.
He wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed Wednesday that read like a combative welcome manual to new GOP senators: “Tea party Republicans were elected to go to Washington and save the country—not be co-opted by the club. So put on your boxing gloves. The fight begins today.”
Let me tell you a short story...
A customer needed a complex part that was made by only one manufacturer. That manufacturer kept jacking up the price year after year, because they were the only game in town. After putting up with this for years, the customer intentionally lost a great deal of up front money—more than several years worth of buying the part from the first manufacturer—to try and create a second source. Shortly after, the original manufacturer invested even more to improve the quality of their part and reduce its production costs, thereby giving the customer a better item at lower price.
Moral of the story: RINOs will continue to sell you crap so long as people like yourself “want no part of” making them risk losing your business.
You want us to nominate only people that the media will molly-coddle?
I say we can nominate whoever we will, but if the leadership is going to stand idly by while candidates have every dirty trick in the book pulled against them by the media, then we will NEVER get anybody except the ones the media anoint - and that will NEVER be anybody who fights the media-DC cabal. They are the enemy. As long as they are in bed with each other and our so-called leaders are content with being part of that cabal, we will get crap, period. There will be no accountability, and with no accountability elections only decide the name of the person who will screw the voters.
See, the thing that has made America exceptional is our Founding Fathers’ understanding of human nature. Power corrupts. The only way we can have anything besides tyranny is if we limit power. That cannot happen when the media is in control of information dissemination to most voters and is in bed with the crooks who hold absolute power over us. That is a cabal. When you throw in the fact that law enforcement is basically appointed by the same crooks who make the laws, what you end up is a system with no checks and balances.
When you have checks and balances it doesn’t matter whether you have dems or repubs in power, because they can only go so far before breaking the law and Constitution and being stopped by law enforcement and the checks and balances.
IOW, we don’t need Republicans in power. We need checks and balances restored so that the worst either dems or repubs can do to us is what is allowable by the Constitution. If that is the worst anybody can do to us, then we don’t need to fear dems OR repubs, and we can get back to arguing about SMALL things, not about the very continued exitence of the country as we know it.
The only way we are going to get away from this polarized existence is when the USA becomes a Constitutional republic. If we have to debate whether we have checks and balances and a Constitution every time a new vote comes up, then this country will be torn apart at the seams. We can’t reinvent the wheel every election cycle. Until the communists and Islamists are willing to let America be - and remain - a Constitutional republic rather than trying to re-form it into something totally different, we are a nation engaged in a civil war. A nation divided against itself cannot stand. The Lord said that, and it is absolutely true.
If we don’t settle this once and for all - in spite of the communists and Islamists trying to take control of all the infrastructure in this country - then this nation is just waiting to fall (which is what both the communists and Islamists are aiming for anyway).
We are WAY past the point when dem and repub matters. What matters is whether America can be a Constitutional republic. If we don’t have the rule of law, and if the media-government-law enforcement cabal isn’t somehow made accountable to the people and the rule of law, then America is ripe for the picking, and we’ve got communists and Islamists both within and outside this country salivating as they watch us in our death throes.
Anybody who doesn’t understand that is not worthy of being elected. There’s a time when we can afford to be petty; this is not it. This is a time when our very existence is in jeopardy. Serious candidates for serious times. Candidates who recognize where we’re at and know how to shoot when the enemy lunges at our jugular.
“Florina and Whitman are as “Moderate” as you can get.
Last I checked, they did not fare any better than COD and Angle.”
Obama carried Nevada by +12, and California by +25. Nevada should be a lot easier for a Republican.
Look a the political realities we are dealing with.
The reality is we nominated two moderates in CA. How did that work out for us?
Absolutely! Nothing coming out of that site is intended to do anything except stir the pot.
“My major anger is at the Establishment GOP types who refuse to support people like O’Donnell....”
The modern-day squishy moderate Repubicans are so ‘extreme in their moderation’ they wouldn’t even follow the example of fellow elder statesman moderate Bob Dole in supporting O’Donnell... :-)
But seriously, I can’t wait to see every last one of one these bozos get canned in the upcoming primaries.
Why do you think I will not vote for or support ANY RINO ever again? Precisely because that strategy has not been advancing my goals. Socialism and anti-Constitutionalism have been getting worse and worse for the past century, because those who favor individual liberty and Constitutionally-limited government have been incrementally losing the war by one compromise after another. THAT ENDS NOW.
You are either for us——and vote along with the coalition—or you are against us. Those registered Republicans who voted (D) instead of (R) in Delaware have chosen to leave or betray the coalition. The law of reciprocity requires that we return the favor and withdraw our support for their candidates.
It can be no other way.
bwc2221: “Unfortunately Graham was reelected in 2008 so he won’t be up until 2014.”
Patience is a virtue, my FRiend. Also, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” Little Lindsey’s time will come.
Obama carried Nevada by +12, and California by +25. Nevada should be a lot easier for a Republican.
Yeah, a SEIU thug state like Nevada should have been easy pickn’s. BTW are you aware that SEIU is contracted to maintain voting machines in Nevada?
You know that California has been lost for some time. It really doesn’t matter who the Republicans nominate there anymore, the state is hopelessly Democratic.
Then why did the NRSC spend 8 million in California?
That has to change. The repubs need to address the critical infrastructure that makes America be America. The voting system is one of those things. We cannot have voting machines maintained by partisan entities. We cannot have a system which only allows partisan-appointed officials to have “standing” to sue to see the laws obeyed.
Right now everything has to be re-invented, because everything is infected with a massive trojan. We need to wipe the hard drive clean and install clean programs with strong anti-virus guards that aren’t dependent on some corrupt administrator who has a reason to turn off the protections.
That is a figurative analogy regarding all our infrastructure and the supposedly built-in checks and balances, but in the case of electronic voting machines it is also very, very literal.
LOL! I want Graham OUT!
“Then why did the NRSC spend 8 million in California?”
Either they are deluded, or hoped to force the Democrats to spend there.
In California, Republicans always look within striking distance during the summer, but by October it is game over. And we always hope, this year will be different.
California has a majority non-white population very loyal to Democrats, and the white population is much more liberal than in the rest of the country.
Too much conservatism wasn’t the problem. The problem was that some of these candidates said and did stupid things that had nothing to do with the issues.
Democrats can get away with it because they promise free money and if you are getting free money from someone, you don’t care how kooky that person is as long as you get the goods.
“Too much conservatism wasn’t the problem. The problem was that some of these candidates said and did stupid things that had nothing to do with the issues.”
There were some “rookie” errors, I defintely agree- but I think going forward, they can be used as a lesson of what not to do in certain cases for future Tea Party candidates. RINOitis, OTOH appears to be incurable in most cases...
“Exit polls show Castle would’ve lost. “
The exit polls are skewed. There may be many who decided they weren’t going to vote for anyone. Or maybe they were so ticked off by o’donnell that it drove more dems to get out and vote for Coons. The O’donnell bashing could’ve affected Toomey as well.
Castle also didn’t have a post-primary campaign. I’m sure that would’ve changed things.
Corrupt bastards.
“These people don’t realize that, tea party candidates galvanized so many people in so many districts all around the country. We would not have had this much seats in house and state legislatures, if it was not for the enthusiasm of tea party people.”
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Exactly! As far as I’m concerned the GOP establishment gets ZERO credit for the enormous Tea-nami we achieved on Election Day.
Screw that worthless linguini-spined RINO Lindsey Graham. I can’t wait to work toward securing his defeat at his next senate primary race.
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