Walk, Trot and Cantor

I am amazed at how the group-think mentality of New York media pundits cannot explain what happened to Cantor.  Listen to Seib in AP: “The victory by a little-known challenger, David Brat, will give a new lease on life to the tea-party forces who supported him.”  Uh, yeah but the Tea Party organizations and leaders paid little attention to Brat and his race thinking it was not serious.  What the race indicated was how many rank-and-file Republicans are fed up.  R’s took the House in 2010 but leadership shrugged saying they couldn’t do anything.  True, but people who support a party like to hear leaders state and expound their views.  Loyal Opposition.

And the notion that Tea Party is some monolithic force is bizarre.  They are grandma and grandpa who didn’t like the direction of the country, found some like-minded souls and protested Obama in 2010.  Most have gone on to join the R’s as staunch conservatives and are now activists.  Most R’s welcome them.  A few doctrinaire guys of this group went around calling everyone RINOs if they didn’t exactly agree.  We called them aside and explained that things don’t work well that way.  A party is a group of somewhat like-minded folks who agree to promote a cause that just about everyone can buy into.  These conservatives are now re-invigorating the party.  Hubba! Hubba!

            Old buddy Ezra Klein, formerly from NY Slimes, wrote,

The upset also sends a signal to the Republican establishment and its business backers that they haven't quite accomplished their goal for the year: taking back control of the party's nominating process from unpredictable grass-roots conservatives who in recent years have succeeded in gaining nominations for candidates in some key races the party has gone on to lose.

                No grass-roots, no election win.  It is a staunch army of grass-roots that the R’s lacked for so long—forcing them to use heavy spending on advertizing to get the word out about candidates.  Dems have been smarter.  They have community organizers imbedded in many ethnic communities continuously.  But Klein, an ardent Dem, longs for the old days when R’s were just me-too D’s who protested the cost of government—green eye-shade guys.

The Republican base, at least in Cantor's district, isn't in the mood for technocratic solutionism. It's still angry, and it still believes that any accommodation is too much accommodation.

 

The next myth is that R’s must have big crossover and independent support among the all-important moderates.  This is baloney.  Turning out the base is what eluded both McCain and Romney because the rank-and-file shrugged and didn’t show up to vote.  Obama got a million fewer votes in 2012 but Romney still couldn’t win because 4 million fewer registered Republicans voted in 2012.  The base was disaffected.  And Independents?  Partisans vote twice as often as Indies.  Independents come in at least 5 flavors.  Some are positively weird, such as the 20% who have an oddball issue.  So long as the candidate supports, say, “coon hunting free access to all properties”, that independent will support the candidate.  But listen to our sage Ezra again, as he postulates a castrated Republican party he’d love to have,

   

If Republicans hadn't scared Senator Arlen Specter into the Democratic Party and if Democrats hadn't kept Senator Joe Lieberman on their side Obamacare would never have passed. If the Tea Party didn't keep knocking off viable Republicans Mitch McConnell would have been Senate Majority Leader since 2010. If Mitt Romney could have run as the Massachusetts moderate he once was Obama might well have lost in 2012. It's possible Republicans will now lose in Virginia's 7th District. The Tea Party is good at policing purity but they're terrible at winning power.

 

Finally, the libs think this was all about immigration and R’s are all racists, they believe.  But observers in Virginia say that immigration only cropped up late in the contest.  The general ‘fed up’ mood of voters with Cantor was the much larger issue.  Listen to this short synopsis by another writer.

 

Immigration reform is dead and Hillary Clinton's presidential hopes are so, so alive. Mere weeks ago the press was writing the Tea Party's obituary. Tonight, the Tea Party claimed its single biggest scalp. This speaks to the weird way the Tea Party exerts powers.

Can someone explain to me what Hillarious gets out of this?  (What difference does it make!?)   The media leftists dearly want a narrative about how R’s are infighting, that there is a tea party insurgency and establishment guys who hate them.  No, it looks to me like one establishment majority leader didn’t listen (Cochran and others beware) to the folks at home  who were fed up.  If anything needs to characterize this year, it is the Year of Fed Up.  62% of the country thinks we are going in the wrong direction.  That sorta defines it.