Posted on 10/15/2009 9:42:46 PM PDT by Steelfish
OCTOBER 16, 2009
Tea-Party Activists Complicate Republican Comeback Strategy
NAFTALI BENDAVID
PLATTSBURGH, N.Y. -- The rise of conservative "tea party" activists around the country has created a dilemma for Republicans. They are breathing life into the party's quest to regain power. But they're also waging war on some candidates hand-picked by GOP leaders as the most likely to win.
In upstate New York, Dede Scozzafava, 49 years old, is the choice of local party leaders to defend a Republican seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, an abortion-rights candidate who could appeal to independents. Doug Hoffman, 59, is a local accountant backed by tea-party activists who has jumped into the race declaring himself the real conservative.
Conservative politics has been given a boost with the rise of "tea party" activists. But WSJ's Naftali Bendavid says the support could backfire on the Republican Party, as opposition mounts to a number of the party's midterm election candidates. WSJ Community
Vote: What effect will conservative tea-party activists have on the GOP? Mr. Hoffman has siphoned so much support from Ms. Scozzafava that their Democratic rival has vaulted into the lead, according to a poll released Thursday. The election is Nov. 3.
"I am not your run-of-the-mill politician, and maybe that's why the Republican bosses didn't like me," Mr. Hoffman told a recent health-care forum sponsored by the Upstate New York Tea Party. In an interview, Ms. Scozzafava acknowledged her discomfort at the event. "I knew it wasn't going to be an easy audience for me," she said.
Republicans are poised to pick up a number of seats in next year's congressional elections, pollsters estimate, on the back of a deep recession, public unease about the growth of government and the size of the nation's deficit. Anti-Obama activism manifested in rallies and town-hall meetings...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
I can only say, “Good”.
The party NEEDS shaking up!
Maybe if we sacrifice a few goats, the party leaders will actually look for conservative candidates who can win, rather than by supposing that independents won’t vote for them.
Ditto.
Stupid, what is the point in running someone who calls himself a Republican, but votes like a Democrat when in office. Sounds like a "loose - loose" strategy to me. Plain Dumb.
I don’t see it as so complicated. You all work for us. Remember that, no problems. Forget it, you’re gone.
“The rise of conservative “tea party” activists...”
Bendavid is a piss-poor journalist. Not even getting the political make-up of tea party activists correct. The majority of tea party participants ARE NOT conservative or Republican.
Whether Libertarian, Democrat, Pumas, Conservative, Republican or unaligned - all these tea party participants want govenment to listen to the people. Those folks in Congress and the White House work for the U.S.citizenry - not the other way around.
Absolutely- The party needs to be cleansed from top to bottom of RINOs. The notion that conservatives cannot win in a blue-state county or state needs to the exploded as the myth it is. Indeed, its better to have a radical left winger win rather than have a (Republican) fraud posing off as a conservative.
Here is why I hated the article>
His book> http://www.randomhouse.ca/catalog/display.pperl?isbn=9780385523288
“The Thumpin”
How Rahm Emanuel and the Democrats Learned to Be Ruthless and Ended the Republican Revolution
Written by Naftali BendavidNaftali Bendavid Author Alert
In the 2006 midterm elections, the Democratic party ended twelve years of electoral humiliation by seizing back Congress and putting an end to Republican rule. The Thumpin’ is the story of that historic victory and the man at the center on whom Democratic hopes hinged: Congressman Rahm Emanuel, head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC).
Chicago Tribune reporter Naftali Bendavid had exclusive access to Emanuel and the DCCC in the year and a half leading up to the elections and ended up with the story of a lifetime, the thrilling blow-by-blow account of how Emanuel remade the campaign in his own ferocious image. Responsible for everything from handpicking Congressional candidates to raising money for attack ads, Emanuel, a talented ballet dancer better known in Washington for his extraordinary intensity and his inexhaustible torrents of profanity, threw out the playbook on the way Democrats run elections.
Instead of rallying the base, Rahm sought moderate-to-conservative candidates who could attract more traditional voters. Instead of getting caught in the Democrats’ endless arguments about their positions, he went on the attack, personally vilifying Republicans from Tom DeLay to Christopher Shays. And instead of abiding by the gentlemen’s agreements of good-old-boy Washington, he broke them, attacking his counterpart in the Republican party and challenging Howard Dean, the chairman of his own party
—
He is a Rahlm lover.
Nice bit of quick research. How he gets to write to the WSJ beats me.
I also wonder about that. The WSJ is a first rate operation overall. Much better than the rest of trash out there.
However, even Fox has a few bad apples.
But they’re also waging war on some candidates hand-picked by GOP leaders as the most likely to win.
We don’t need any Snowes and Specters. Let choose candidates that represent the party’s values. Oh that’s right the party doesn’t have any values.
But he’s right on this. The old saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
We saw this a lot last election. The national GOP only supports candidates that IT wants...the RINOs. Reagan said it best when he said, “A political party cannot be all things to all people. It must represent certain fundamental beliefs which must not be compromised to political expediency or simply to swell its numbers.” How could the GOP forget that?
Party leaders themselves must be replaced with conservatives.
Money & Power, Fat and Sassy Elitists,
Ronald Reagan said he did not leave the democratic party. The party left him.
I say the same thing about the republican party.
I am SO done with those snakes.
Another Quisling RINO vermin.
Why not just admit it, AP?
Cheers!
While I am certainly willing to conceed that some democrats, independents and libertarians have been involved with the tea parties, what evidence can you possibly have that they were the MAJORITY?
No more RINOs.
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