GOP senators fight over failure

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.”

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.”

“I think this is a debate we have to have, in light of the results. The O’Donnell circus consumed the Philadelphia media and brought down Toomey’s margins as well.”

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And just exactly what proof can you furnish to back up your claim? Can you point us to one person who went to the polling booth in Pennsylvania with the mindset of “Gee, I was going to vote for Pat Toomey but I’m going to vote for Sestak instead because I don’t like that whack-job O’Donnell in Delaware”. Please!

The bottom line is, Toomey secured a senate victory in a traditionally BLUE state.... PERIOD. I don’t care if it was by 1 vote or 1 million votes. Republicans seldom win there and if Toomey had lost, I can assure you O’Donnell wouldn’t have had a darned thing to do with it.

“The debate is over. RINOS ARE OUT! SQUISHY reach-across-the-aisle fossil incumbents are on life support.

2012 will show them the exit door.

It’s the RINOS AND MODERATES who made both parties look and act alike.

NO MORE. So what that we lost with a good conservative candidate in solid blue state? Castle was worse than a democrat and the polling said Coons the Marxist would have defeated him too.

You see, RINOS have taken the conservative vote for granted and it’s not there for the taking anymore.”

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Amen to that! Conservatives and the Tea Party are NOT going away and we will welcome the fight to purge the GOP of any RINOs who betray our conservative principles.

It’s a new era indeed! We are in the process of forever changing the establishment landscape in Washington!

“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.”

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Or maybe O’Donnell was harmed because Castle, Rove, and the rest of the GOP establishment not only refused to back her with their support, but instead publicly smeared and ridiculed her?

I cast the blame squarely on the GOP establishment for O’Donnell’s loss more than anything.

Well, that’s about enough of this chit.

Graham is from that little elitist club in SC that has for over a hundred years thought having an almost feminine manner and soft speech was a sign of breeding, manners, and intellect. Not to say education, of course, because the only sign of that was the proper schools from cradle to grave.

Now, not everyone in that club is “old money” or even old families with old family names so you can’t tell them by their roots. You can tell them by their affected manners of speech and sensitivity. Things that “offend” and upset Graham are much the same as those that upset the Victorian era Brits who were climbing into the “better classes” and denying that anyone in their family had ever done anything so shabby as mine coal or sell rags even though their entry into the middle and upper classes was based on those very things. Sure, during a campaign you can talk about “Diddy worked in the mills”, but you’ll be forgiven that along with the other lies you tell to get the “lint heads” on you side.

Asking Graham what he thinks about the Republican approach, particularly what he thinks about anything Jim does, is no different than asking a snobbish Brit or one of the few democrat fascists who still pretend to have manners. They’re never going to like Jim, they’re never going to accept him into their “club”, and they’re really, really, pissed off that he ever won the office of Senator from SC in the first place. They’ve seen him as a usurper from day one, worked behind the scenes many times to hurt his efforts on a state level, and at least Graham himself would more than likely vote the opposite of Jim just out of spite to cancel his vote out.

I guess there is stuff like this going on in every state, but when know people involved, it’s three times as disgusting. Especially when you respect the hell out of someone who you personally know made it all on their own by virtue of hard work and honesty and see them targeted like this.

Regards

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