"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish?
Nothing else."~Epictetus
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Posted on 08/04/2014 5:54:42 AM PDT by Maceman
The Senate minority leader, long reviled among many on the right for what they see as kowtowing to Democrats, is in a tough race for his seat—and in trouble with the Tea Party.
If Alison Lundergan Grimes pulls off an upset victory over Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in November, she may have Tea Partiers to thank. But don’t expect conservative voters to rally to Grimes—they simply aren't getting behind McConnell.
Although the five-term Republican ended up winning a a tough primary challenge from businessman Matt Bevin handily, the race was one of the most vicious and ugly this cycle, with Bevin’s campaign badly damaged in a cockfighting scandal. And while some disaffected conservatives have backed McConnell in November, Bevin has still not endorsed him, and many of the Tea Party groups that supported the businessman are following suit. As a result, in a recent poll, nearly 20% of self-identified Republicans didn't support McConnell
Scott Hofstra, spokesman for the United Kentucky Tea Party, said he isn’t backing McConnell and “taking the lesser of the two evils approach.” Many conservatives, Hofstra predicted, either will leave the box on the ballot for U.S. Senate empty or will vote for David Patterson, the libertarian candidate. The senator has alienated many Tea Partiers and has yet to reach out to bridge the gap, Hofstra said. The divide was opened further, he added, by McConnell’s open support for Thad Cochran in the Mississippi Senate runoff and McConnell’s association with pro-Cochran ads that many conservatives assailed as race-baiting. “If there were some people on the fence after what happened in Kentucky, the Mississippi incident really put them over the edge,” Hofstra said. Still, he noted that Tea Party dissatisfaction with McConnell wasn’t winning Grimes their votes. “I haven’t talked to anybody who would vote her.”
Andrew Schachtner, president of the Louisville Tea Party and a former Bevin campaign staffer, sounded somewhat more restrained than Hofstra in his comments to The Daily Beast. He said his group “was focusing on state and local issues” instead of the Senate race. In particular, he said, the Louisville Tea Party was prioritizing a local state house candidate to help Republicans gain control of the Kentucky House of Representatives. As for the McConnell-Grimes race, Schachtner said he had decided whom he would vote for but declined to disclose that candidate’s identity.
It’s not just Grimes who stands to benefit from Tea Party doubts about McConnell. Patterson, a policeman from the central Kentucky town of Harrodsburg, is seeking to get on the ballot as the Libertarian candidate. A recent poll put Patterson at 7 percent in the race and poised to be a spoiler. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Patterson said he felt confident that his team would get the necessary signatures and noted that he was already preparing in advance for any legal challenge.
Although McConnell has had a slight edge over Grimes in recent polls, most political observers consider the race a tossup, and it looks likely to be tight through Election Day.
But Patterson said that at the moment he is not directly appealing to disaffected Tea Partiers. While he said his campaign “will definitely appeal to those…who are absolutely fed up with the way McConnell has been voting in D.C.,” the Libertarian was aiming to attract those voters who feel “disenfranchised” by the two-party system. While he took pains to say he wasn’t “modeling his campaign after anybody,” he mentioned Gary Johnson’s presidential campaign as a possible inspiration: “more fiscally conservative than the Republicans and more socially accepting than the Democrats.”
Yet despite lingering anger over the primary and the potential appeal of Patterson, some Tea Partiers are rallying around McConnell. Frank Simon of the Tea Party of Kentucky said he is “very much for McConnell over Grimes…Politics is always the lesser of two evils. McConnell is always much better than Grimes. Grimes is pro-abortion.” But Simon said he couldn’t “speak for all the Tea Parties.” Instead, his group’s approach is to try “to make friends with people, because that’s the only way we’re going to survive,” he said. “We’re trying to overlook problems that we had before and trying to pull together to survive November.”
Simon said the bulk of his group’s efforts would involve a voter guide that was put out “not under this organization” but through a political action committee and another organization, which would go out to about 30,000 people. He told The Daily Beast that “unless something unforeseen happens, it will endorse McConnell over Grimes.” The bulk of the voter guides will go out through churches, which is allowed, he said, because it “also gives the pro-abortion endorsements, pro-homosexual endorsements, pro-labor endorsements.”
Exactly right.
"Is freedom anything else than the right to live as we wish?
Nothing else."~Epictetus
God bless this site, this Free Republic.
Please click the pic
There is no mending. McConnell funded those ads in Mississippi accusing the Tea Party of racism. There is no forgiveness. He needs to go.
Be prepared, the GOPe apologists are out in full force today. I think Reince promised extra bonus checks this weekend.
Maceman,
With all due respect, if a person joins the forces of “evil” to help that “evil” defeat the forces of the “insufficiently perfect”, then that person is really NOT promoting “perfection”.
That person is promoting “evil”.
Such people are called “useful idiots” precisely because they do NOT promote the virtue or perfection they imagine. Their actions promote “evil”, just as much as if they were, in fact, well-paid Obama-campaign-funded trolls.
It seems that you are willing to help Obama appoint Eric Holder as our next Supreme Court Justice.
IMHO, you need to ask yourself what “message” THAT tragic defeat for America would convey to patriots — and to the world.
Because we are doing So Well with Republican-Democrats. So which one of Obama's Judicial nominees did McConnell NOT vote for?
“As usual, when a bad guy (McConnell) gets pointed out, and good guys (Tea Party) does something about it, the good guys are suddenly painted as the bad people.”
Take candy from babies and they cry. Sometimes a parent has to do that, or the baby gets sick.
That’s what parenting (leadership) is all about.
You think this is sour grapes? Is that what you call it when a member of your own party deliberately targets you as a racist?
This is way beyond sour grapes, this is a deadly threat to our existence.
It's not about Bevin, it's about McDaniel, and what Mitch McConnell paid for in Mississippi. He put a dagger in our back, and probably cost us that Senate seat as well.
Again, this is not about the primary. This is about McConnell tampering with the Mississippi election in which he paid for ads portraying both Chris McDaniel and Tea Party folk in general as Racists intent on stopping black people from voting.
This was a nuke weapon he launched against us, and he needs to pay for it to discourage others from trying it again.
Then you should be blaming McConnell for making her viable. He is the one who attacked his base, and that was a very stupid thing for him to do.
If the Senate is ran by people opposed to the Tea Party, nothing is going to get solved anyway. It will not advance the cause of conservatism, it will just have our party in power during the collapse.
Had he left it at that you would have a point. He didn't. He attacked us in Mississippi as well. He probably cost us that Senate seat because of his underhanded backstabbing tactic of portraying Tea Party Conservatives as racists who want to prevent black people from voting.
We cannot afford to let McConnell get away with it.
Getting a man who declared war on the Tea Party, who is in the pocket of Wealthy big government donors, who ran racist attack ads against the Tea Party in Mississippi, and who opposes every effort by the Tea Party to reign in big government, who keeps voting for Obama's Judicial nominees, and who never tries to strenuously oppose the Democrats, THAT would be the disaster.
Yeah, let me acquaint you with this attack ad paid for by Mitch McConnell's PAC.
So now what was that you were saying about somebody joining the forces of evil to defeat the less than perfect?
And the democrat in Mississippi is arguably more conservative than McConnel or Cochran
Rhetoric wise
Ugly ad.
How do you “know” it came from McConnell and NOT from Obama?
Please don’t tell me, “Because Obama never lies”.
So you’ll be voting for the Democrat, Alison Grimes. Just want to make sure we have that clear.
We need to figure out with some confidence how many seats we are likely to win, and how many we can strategically lose and still hold the Senate.
We came close to winning the Senate in 2012, but all the Senate races collapsed after the convention. I blame McConnell's failure of leadership for the 2012 Senate losses. He failed to make retaking the Senate a national issue. He failed to get out in front of the news and make the news.
We may never retake the Senate because of McConnell, not due to a McConnell loss.
-PJ
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