Braking News !
Posted on 05/23/2014 5:18:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
The moment Matt Bevin was shown the door back to private life in Kentucky Tuesday night, you could hear liberal analysts’ hands rub together in glee. Their night had come, another milepost on the road toward the extinction of the dreaded Tea Party.
How else to explain Mitch McConnell’s win, and the failure of specific tea party candidates to make the Senate runoff in Georgia? Surely the insurgency is dying. Surely the fires of Tea Party discontent are dwindling as the batons are passed back to the establishment figures who will occasionally work with, and even vote like— Democrats.
Well, hit the pause button on that.
As Kurt Schlichter wisely observed here in March, “if the conservative insurgency has been crushed, why was Mitch McConnell walking around onstage at CPAC with a musket?” The Tea Party’s greatest claim to victory is that its values have been absorbed into the bloodstream of the Republican party itself. What is dwindling is the need to firmly stamp some candidates as “Tea Party” and others as something else.
Are there still cafeteria conservatives in the GOP, picking and choosing the items they wish to run on? Certainly. The RINO is not yet an extinct species. But there have been no Republican winners this primary season offering themselves up as proud centrists, establishment heroes or Rockefeller retreads. From Kentucky’s McConnell to John Cornyn in my state of Texas to various House races featuring incumbents surviving Tea Party challengers, the results did not reveal distaste for the grassroots approach. What was on display was a class of incumbents who have been shown the new stripes on the playing field.
To their credit, they were able to show a sufficient number of Tea Party voters that they have heard the cries from the conservative base and are willing to listen.
There remains the possibility that we are all being hosed. It is one thing to sound conservative on the campaign trail, and wholly another to actually govern in that fashion. But when Mitch McConnell told his state (and the nation) that he would do “better as offensive coordinator (Senate Majority Leader) than defensive coordinator,” an understandable reply was: “You’d better.”
While some conservative voters are willing to take a leap of faith with familiar names who profess enlightenment, the Tea Party purists remain skeptical, and they are not to be blamed. The Kentuckians who voted for Bevin had simply had it up to their eyeballs with a status quo featuring Republicans unwilling to stand up to Obama-era expansionism. They consider fresh faces the only option, and that is not unreasonable.
But the lesson is: not every Tea Party candidate brings the brilliance, skill and message discipline of Ted Cruz. Please remember that America’s strongest Tea Party icon did not take out an entrenched incumbent to reach the Senate. He captured an open seat, and thus the hearts of conservatives tired of decades of Republican meekness. If the Tea Party phenomenon is at such an ebb, why is its biggest star the most powerful force in Washington?
When Tea Party candidates lose, sometimes it’s due to flaws other than ideology. Some are not the crispest campaigners. Some do not have the sharpest staffs. Sometimes they say wacky things and hang themselves.
None of those events constitute a narrative of a Tea Party in decline.
FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe has it precisely right: “Everybody runs like a Tea Party candidate now,” he observed. “Everybody is running against Obamacare and against overspending in Washington. It wasn’t always like that with the Republican establishment. I don’t even recognize McConnell from where he was a few years ago.”
Precisely. That is the power of the Tea Party, this movement supposedly on the ropes. If not as many easily stampable “Tea Party” candidates are rocketing up the ladders of power, their views surely are, newly embraced by some incumbents who recognize that the old Republican party is dead, or needs to be.
The strength of the Tea Party was never going to be measured by how many of its candidates did battle against the Republican party; its success is confirmed by the extent of its thorough infiltration of the party, moving it to the right by championing consistent, unapologetic conservatism— which is all the Tea Party has ever been.
I guess the brakes aren’t going our way.
This article would be more credible of the GOP-e wasn’t spending more money against Tea Party candidates than against Democrats.
Breaks?????
Boehner, McConnell, Graham and McCain’s collective gloating and derision of the Tea Party ooga booga will come back to bite them in the a$$ if they don’t shut up and take their wins humbly.
Those Mexicans you think will vote for you if you just let those 12-50 Million illegals have citizenship will NOT be there to vote for you. And many of those conservative Tea Party sentiment voters you ridicule won’t be there either.
The “tea party” became everything and was doomed without formal structure and principles to eventually become nothing. Anybody could hang out a “tea party” sign, and they did.
McConnell lost 40% of the vote in a republican primary as the Minority Leader of the US Senate in a state he’s been an elected official for over 35 years.
That’s pathetic.
Yes. Tap the breaks. Breaks need to be tapped.
Good points in the article.
I am in accord.
Tea is seeping back in - if slowly from appearances.
C’mon, dave, gimme a brake.
One brake, Coming Uuuuup!
The author probably meant brakes and used a voice program and because there is no spelling error he didn’t notice the mistake
Braking News !
That’s why news orgs should hire English majors.
exactly right
I agree with this. Nobody (well maybe McCain) is running in a Republican primary as the bipartisan compromise douche we are all longing for. Those days are over.
Some bipartisan compromise douches still seep through, but that because not enough Republicans study the candidates and see who is actually going to fight the fight.
The Tea Party has shifted the debate within the Republican Party to the right, but it moves at a glacial pace. We need to keep the pressure on the Republicans and keep shoving.
Count on it.
But, but, but...I have been told repeatedly (and rudely) here on this forum that the TEA Party did not need leadership or an organization, and that its lack of structure was its strength.
Guess the chest beaters were wrong.
All we need to do is look at how much chaos sown by just a handful of tea partiers in DC.
We don’t have to win every race or even most of them as long as we keep winning a few with the right people who can force change in Washington.
The NC GOP has for the fist time ever, dating back to the Civil War, taken from the Rebels (DNC) the State House, Senate and Governorship - and with that power has reshaped North Carolina fiscally and politically. They have Kate Hagan on the Run - and for the first time ever in Fayetteville we have Republican Judge. Times are changing in the Deep South, but should the Tea Party sit back and pat itself on the back. The primary season was one in which the establishment GOP beat it challengers within the conservative sphere. TEA Party is not dead but might as well be in Cumberland County because from what I saw attending meetings was a group of Liberals Fiscally Minded - this is not GOP nor is it conservative. If the TEA Party is failing it is precisely because of its internal politics - if not for their concern about Budgets, I would have guessed them all to be Social Leftists; therein lies the problem - they are not conservative at the end of the Campaign season. Our local TEA Party would do better campaigning as Democrats because that is their Social Constituency.
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