Posted on 08/30/2010 2:18:30 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
IN THE END Senator John McCain may have won his Arizona Republican primary comfortably last week, but it has been at quite a price. Although outspending his Tea Party-backed opponent, JD Hayworth, by 10 to one, the former presidential candidate has also been forced into a number of major policy U-turns – not least, Irish migrants will note with regret, sharply hardening his line on immigration – that testify to the political clout the conservative movement continues to demonstrate in the run-up to November’s elections.
While the much-predicted anti-incumbent surge of angry voters has not materialised uniformly, the loose-knit Tea Party coalition that opposes higher taxes and state spending has both been taking nominations off Republicans while also successfully driving the party to the right. In the process their fellow traveller, Alaska’s former governor and vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, has been successfully preparing the ground for her own expected presidential bid – her standing is such that even McCain felt the need to call in his former running mate to testify to his conservative credentials.
In Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski appears not to have been as fortunate as McCain. She looks set to lose her primary to Palin- and Tea Party-backed Joe Miller, a virtual unknown with precious little cash at his disposal. It is a shocking upset for the states most popular politician and the Republican establishment, and the biggest notch in Palin’s political belt yet.
In Florida the Republican Senate nomination was 10 days ago won with a resounding 85 per cent vote by another Tea Party favourite, Mark Rubio. He will now face a tough three-way contest against a Democratic congressman, Kendrick Meek, and current moderate Republican governor Charlie Crist, running as an independent because of the Rubio challenge. Crist and Rubio are neck and neck. To date the Tea Party movement has also successfully beaten establishment candidates in primaries in Nevada, Kentucky and Utah.
All of which is making the mid-terms a critical contest, and not just about who will have a majority in Congress (Republicans need an extra 39 seats to do so, and a more difficult seven, for the Senate). Just as much at stake is the struggle for the soul of the rightward-marching Republican Party and its prospects for 2012, what one journalist has called its internal “insurrection”.
After heavy losses in the last four years, it was natural Republicans would seek a new direction. But, instead of seeing in McCain’s defeat by Barack Obama a sign of the need to recapture the centre ground, as the British Tories did, the majority interprets it as a failure of the party to adhere sufficiently rigorously to conservative ideology. Polls show the proportion of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who consider themselves conservative has risen 10 per cent to 67 percent in the last 10 years. The capitulation of the de facto leader of the party and newly chastened McCain to that perspective is as significant as his primary win, and a taste of more to come. And more Palin too.
Now he will swing hard to the left for the general election. Amnesty of some sort will become his main theme. Of course, enforce the laws and build the dang fence will always be added to his stump speeches just after he decries there is no way to deport 12 million illegals and we must find a way to legalize them. AMNESTY.
If the Irish would hang drywall and live 16 to a cheap motel room they’d be welcomed! As it is they might not turn out to be democrats so they really just aren’t needed.
You can bet on it.
If this uneducated pin head read a little history; he’d find that the Irish came into the country legally!
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