Sorry, folks Rove was correct, and ya’ll are just shooting the messenger.
The Tea Partiers focused too much on “purity” and not enough on electability. Extremely bad candidates got chosen in some races that should have been cakewalks during this election cycle.
The Tea Partiers literally wrecked the GOP in Colorado, nominating a Republican candidate (Dan Maes) who was so bad he couldn’t garner 10% of the vote, thereby relegating my party to minor party status in my state, a very troublesome development. (Dan Maes was so unpopular, that that fool Alvin Greene in South Carolina garnered over three times as many votes, percentage wise than Maes.)
In addition, The Colorado Tea Partiers brought us that fool Ken Buck who repeatedly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by his inability to stay on message and who continuously waxed poetic on dozens of divisive issues of little central importance to most voters. With her experience from previously winning state elections, Jane Norton, who Buck defeated in the primary, could have handily beat the unpopular Bennett.
Sharon Angle was a weak candidate too. Either of her two opponents would have waltzed over Reid.
And the really sad thing is that Senators are far more valuable than Congresspersons, since it requires a two-thirds majority of them to govern, and there are so few of them.
I’ve written repeatedly about the importance of electability, and not just being “conservative”. I was just commenting to my wife that the naive and starry eyed liberals get bad candidates like Obama who get elected, but the naive starry eyed Tea Partiers get bad candidates who don’t get elected.
Conservatives who have done well like Scott Brown, Marco Rubio, and my own newly elected Cory Gardner here in CO-4 on the eastern plains of Colorado first paid their dues in the state legislatures. It gave them time to mature as candidates, learn the ropes, and make their big mistakes in small ponds first. The military does not promote privates directly to generals for a reason, and unfortunately the Tea Party promoted way too many privates into generals who were essentially clueless about how to lead their troops to victory.
I admire and appreciate the enthusiasm and energy of the Tea Partiers, but this purity nonsense is totally self-destructive. It is simply not possible for a candidate to perfectly represent exactly ALL of the positions of more than a very few voters, maybe none, actually. Therefore, in addition to electability, it is necessary to agree upon a small number of core issues amongst the support group. Over hundreds of years (not just in the U.S. mind you) political parties formed to formalize this platform-building process to avoid the bloody self-destruction that results from a no-rules, no-holds-barred, hand-to-hand combat over “purity”.
Personally, I simplified this election to a single issue, namely, were you staunchly opposed to the Obama agend, would you follow through on your word to repeal Obammunism and were you the most electable candidate with the preceding two attributes. This greatly focused my thought processes and made my decisions easy about who to support with my energy and money.
People can whine all they want about Rove, but Rove did not cause a single loss by a candidate, he merely made predilections that unfortunately turned out to be correct.
In my book, the only thing that counts is results, not simply giving it the good ol’ college try. That kind of thinking is the same kind of false self-esteem-building nonsense in the public schools: it’s ok to fail as long as you try real hard.
Hopefully, the Tea Partiers will grow up, learn from their mistakes, and focus more on winning in the future rather than purity.
It's one thing to correctly see that many of the lifetime GOP pols are not friends of conservatism.
But what we saw in the O'Donnell campaign as well as (to a lesser extent) Angle, Buck, and Paladino, was the attempt to exalt political naivete as a outright virtue.
That concept, to put it mildly, failed.
Don't hold your breath. "Conservatives" gave the Dems control in 2006, and are determined to keep them in power at the expense of moderate Repubs (RINOs).
That's one of the reasons we are doomed.
BTW...excellent post but not many here will agree.
Agree. wasn't that long ago that liberals were blaming all their troubles and woes on Rove. He was their poster boy for everything they despise. Funny how the tables have turned. All he has to do is show up on FNC for a 5-min. segment and question the creds of one or two conservative candidates and he's evil incarnate. The guy is paid to be an analyst, not a cheeleader.
Oh, and libs still hate his guts.
You make some decent points, but here’s the problem. Placing ideology over electability can be as bad as placing electability over ideology. You acknowledge the former but ignore the latter. What I mean is, it’s a balancing act. The infamous Buckley Rule didn’t say to nominate the most electable candidate. It said to nominate the most electable CONSERVATIVE candidate.
My point? Mike Castle was simply NOT a conservative. Dress it up any way you want, but he was as horrible a candidate (from a conservative perspective) as O’Donnell was from an electability perspective. That’s a fair assessment I think. You think O’Donnell was a bad candidate. I think Mike Castle was a bad candidate.
As for the “purist” argument, that’s a crock. O’Donnell wasn’t selected simply because she was ideologically pure. She was selected because Mike Castle was ideologically a non-entity as far as conservatives go. An 80% conservative who was far more polished, experienced and electable than either O’Donnell or Castle would have done better. Of course, by 80% conservative I really mean making government smaller 80% of the time. For some strange reason, 80% conservative for moderate/centrists seems to mean agreeing with Democrats (and expanding government) 80% of the time.
If the Republican leadership wants to win races, then maybe they need to work to nominate candidates who are more palatable to BOTH factions in the Republican Party. That’s the key point that almost everyone misses. We conservatives don’t want to support hacks like Castle any more than the moderates want to support ideologically pure political neophytes like O’Donnell. THEREFORE, the Republican leadership needs to find and promote candidates that are a better fit from both perspectives rather than serving up ideological trash like Arlen Spectre!
Give us candidates that are ideologically acceptable AND electable, and the party can unify to win elections. That, my FRiend, is key to winning races AND reigning in big government! I only hope the Republican Party is listening.