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Interesting take on the election results. I hadn't heard about the GOP abandoning Cuccinelli. Is Reince trying to tame the wild wing?
How the GOP Establishment Tea Partied the Tea Party
On Tuesday, Republican Ken Cuccinelli lost the Virginia governor's race by less than 3 percentage points—a far smaller margin than the polls had led people to expect. The defeat has conservatives up in arms. Cuccinelli, they charge, could have won had he not been abandoned by the Republican National Committee and other interest groups that saw him as a lost cause.
"The GOP establishment, rather than come to the aid of Cuccinelli, left him out hanging to drive [sic]," Tea Party Patriots leader Jenny Beth Martin said in a statement. "He was betrayed by his own party," fumed Rush Limbaugh, who accused the party of wanting Cuccinelli to lose. Cuccinelli was outspent by more than $15 million; he got no funding from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and his $3 million from the RNC was just one-third the amount the committee spent for his predecessor four years ago.
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Since its ascendance as a political force, the Tea Party has drawn its power from exactly the tactics the establishment used on Tuesday. The far right has thrown most of its energies into Republican primaries; it has loudly refused to support candidates that didn't meet its standards; it has threatened to sit out elections featuring an "impure" nominee; and it has been perfectly willing to lose seats for the party if that was the price of getting its way. Whether knocking off respected incumbents like Dick Lugar and Bob Bennett or elevating untested candidates like Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell, the Tea Party's M.O. has been to pour resources into draining, quixotic intraparty battles, even if they came at the expense of general-election victories.
...
Conservatives can complain all they want. But what's being done to them is only what they've done in the past. The Republican establishment has turned the Tea Partiers' tactics against them, and the establishment is winning.
On Tuesday, Republican Ken Cuccinelli lost the Virginia governor's race by less than 3 percentage points—a far smaller margin than the polls had led people to expect. The defeat has conservatives up in arms. Cuccinelli, they charge, could have won had he not been abandoned by the Republican National Committee and other interest groups that saw him as a lost cause.
"The GOP establishment, rather than come to the aid of Cuccinelli, left him out hanging to drive [sic]," Tea Party Patriots leader Jenny Beth Martin said in a statement. "He was betrayed by his own party," fumed Rush Limbaugh, who accused the party of wanting Cuccinelli to lose. Cuccinelli was outspent by more than $15 million; he got no funding from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and his $3 million from the RNC was just one-third the amount the committee spent for his predecessor four years ago.
...
Since its ascendance as a political force, the Tea Party has drawn its power from exactly the tactics the establishment used on Tuesday. The far right has thrown most of its energies into Republican primaries; it has loudly refused to support candidates that didn't meet its standards; it has threatened to sit out elections featuring an "impure" nominee; and it has been perfectly willing to lose seats for the party if that was the price of getting its way. Whether knocking off respected incumbents like Dick Lugar and Bob Bennett or elevating untested candidates like Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell, the Tea Party's M.O. has been to pour resources into draining, quixotic intraparty battles, even if they came at the expense of general-election victories.
...
Conservatives can complain all they want. But what's being done to them is only what they've done in the past. The Republican establishment has turned the Tea Partiers' tactics against them, and the establishment is winning.
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