While the Akins, Mourdocks, O’Donnells and Angles of the world satisfy the anti-GOPe itch at nomination time, unfortunately they don’t hand the political acumen to run a winning campaign. Harry Reid should’ve been long relegated to backbench hell by know, but got a major reprieve when Sharron Angle won the primary in 2010.
While I strongly support the TEA Party’s philosophies, their choices for Senate seats are often lacking.
*HAVE the political acumen
Because establishment picks like Tommy Thompson and Rick Berg have a great record of success.
Correct. In the primaries we should be nominating the most conservative candidate that CAN win.
But the establishment has had some pretty major whiffs on the Senate side too, and who can forget the social conservatives nominating Todd Akin (the TEA Party candidate was Sarah Steelman and she would have almost certainly defeated Claire McCaskill).
As we see one of the fault lines dividing the more conservative grass roots is actually TEA Party versus socon's as evident in N.C. where Huckabee (and his traditionalist, religious wing of the party) endorsed Reverend Mike Harris who would never have won a general election anyway. Give Harris's votes to Brannon and it would have been extremely close instead of a runaway Tillis victory.
Either way, all the talk about the TEA Party being dead is nonsense. It is pushing the party to the right, even when it doesn't win primaries. It forces "establishment" candidates to go on record as further to the right than they'd otherwise choose to be. It's kinda like the now defunct 99% Occutard movement in one way. We all laugh at that silliness, but it took debt off the national agenda and replaced it with income inequality as an issue. Even today that effect lingers. The TEA Party doesn't have to win every election, they just have to yank the party rightward.
And of all the people bemoaning the Republican Party being too centrist, I wonder when they can point out in modern history when it has been any better? I'd say the GOP, however unwilling, is more conservative now than it has been in forever. People forget the Republican party in the 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's and up until the Gingrich revolution was a limp wrist go-along, get-along token opposition with the likes of Bob Michel essentially running it. Was Ike very conservative? Was Nixon? Geeze, Nixon gave us the EPA, price controls and all manner of liberal badness.
But I do agree, conservatives need to vet our candidates better and line up behind folks that CAN actually win. Nominating someone who has no chance, and worse - no future, is a total waste of time.