Tea Party Challenger Fails in Kansas (Kansas!)

The news that just came across my screen on Fox that incumbent Senator Pat Roberts has prevailed in his primary for reelection to the Senate from Kansas (or in his case from Arlington, Virginia) is heartbreaking.

The implications are dispiriting. His victory implies that in the American heartland the Republican Party cannot reform itself when confronted with an egregious example of elitism. If the Republican Party in Kansas (Kansas!) cannot reform itself there, how can it expect to prevail in purple states? How can we expect to carry a message to Reagan Democrats and Independents if The Tea Party cannot even convince Kansas farmers that their absentee senator of 36 years no longer remotely represents their interests in Washington?

If The Tea Party in Kansas cannot penetrate the consciousness of staunch conservatives where can it prevail? If the apparatus of the Republican machine in Kansas can prevail with a flat-out Rino whose very connection to the state is so patently fraudulent over a genuine grassroots conservative, a physician, how can the GOP establishment be reformed anywhere?

Before I give in to despair I will await the postmortems which will no doubt tell me that Pat Roberts flooded the zone with money, beat us on the airwaves, that our candidate was somehow flawed, that the challengers simply did not have the infrastructure and the ground game etc.

But I fear that even in these parlous times of malaise at home and failure everywhere abroad, the ideal constituency of The Tea Party was indifferent to the current state of affairs or was somehow behind the power curve and utterly ignorant of the facts of Pat Roberts residence and voting record. Somehow, the message in this case cannot be said to have been wrong, at best we can hope that the cause was a failure of execution. I doubt such a best case but I await the details.

Finally, this defeat for reform is alas not an isolated setback. We have seen that the Republican establishment apparatus is so powerful in Mississippi that it can set aside a decisive Tea Party victory in a primary by hijacking the runoff. We have seen what has happened in South Carolina, Kentucky and what will happen in Tennessee. I hope we get enough data out of these primaries to tell us what went wrong. With luck we will find that we simply do not have the infrastructure to prevail in an election on a statewide basis because a reform movement cannot hope to prevail once every six years with a top-down effort against a well entrenched, fully financed Republican establishment. No matter what the data tells me, however, I am discouraged by the tone deafness of Republicans everywhere.

>> Thanks but “What have they done”? “What have they done”? More than one person has repeated that line, someone on the radio must be using it a lot. What as Roberts done? Voted conservative for his entire career. What has Wolf done? Flapped his gums, looked in the mirror and wished he was a Senator, and joked about people’s x-rays on the Internet. <<

Yep, one set of rules for the incumbent, another for the challenger.

The Wolf fan club wanted to make this race about "what have they done?" but ONLY demanded an answer from the incumbent. The challenger was held to a different standard and did not need to demonstrate any such commitment to conservatism throughout their career. All they had to do is TALK conservative for a few months during a Senate race -- ironically the very thing they hypocritically blasted the incumbent for doing!

Mark Levin claimed he KNEW Wolf was a sure thing because Wolf was conservative "BEFORE becoming a Senator". He's wrong. We never "knew" that about Wolf. In fact, the question had been posed dozens of times asking when Wolf had demonstrated conservative principles BEFORE he decided he wanted a Senate seat, and NONE of his fans could demonstrate a single example.

Blasting Roberts for not living in Kansas was an example of the same set of differing rules for the incumbent and the challenger. If Roberts HADN'T held elective office and was screaming "TEA PARTY!!" at the top of his lungs, they'd have no problems whatsoever with the fact he was living most of the year in Virginia and had done so for decades. We know this because numerous candidates who screamed "TEA PARTY!!" weren't living in the state they were running from. They had absolutely no problem with those candidates doing so, but we're supposed to believe it's an unforgivable sin that PROVES they're "out of touch" if the incumbent does it. No sale.

Credible conservatives with track records don't play these games. A meme all over the internet points out how Ronald Reagan didn't spend his entire term blaming Carter for the economy being bad. Instead, he went to work and fixed the problem. That's the difference between him and an empty suit like Obama. Nobody needs to ask Joe Carr or Chris McDaniels "what have they done?" because they have track records SHOWING exactly what they've done BEFORE they decided they wanted people to elect them Senator. That's the difference between them and empty suits like Wolf.

What's amusing here is NathanForrest creates this vanity thread specifically trying to "analyze" his candidates losing and ask people "what went wrong"? that caused incumbents to win and Tea Party candidates to lose. Numerous people here have chimed in here and told him the same thing over and over (you need to pick your battles carefully, you needed to concentrate more on beating actual RINOs, there was nothing wrong with Roberts record that merited a challenge, Wolf was not a credible challenger, you can't make up standards for candidates as you go along and be inconsistent, etc.) Now he's doesn't what the hear it.

I guess the truth hurts. Sorry, sometimes you just have to man up and accept that your team screwed up.

You you might have kept your balance better than I, it could well be that I am grossly overreacting and the Republic will simply muddle through as it has for decades, there will be no reckoning and our liberties will simply survive intact. I concede that is certainly a possibility but I do find it extraordinary that those who are less exercised about the recent election results are also opposed to the Article V movement.

I think the two go hand-in-hand and that's why I have connected them in recent posts on this thread. If the election process is failing us we are left with Article V, if one is opposed to Article V, one is less likely to find fault with this electoral season.

This is an occasion in which I hope you are right and I am wrong.

All the best.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.