{"id":13443,"date":"2014-08-13T00:46:14","date_gmt":"2014-08-13T07:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=13443"},"modified":"2014-08-13T00:46:14","modified_gmt":"2014-08-13T07:46:14","slug":"is-the-tea-party-really-losing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2014\/08\/13\/is-the-tea-party-really-losing\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the Tea Party Really Losing?"},"content":{"rendered":"

2014 has far fewer Tea Party Republican candidates for the House and especially the Senate than they have recent elections.  I miss running against the likes of Sharon \u201cSecond Amendment Solution\u201d Angle, Christine \u201cI am not a witch\u201d O\u2019Donnell and Rick \u201cGoogle my name\u201d Santorum.  TEAbuggery can be damn useful at election time.  It gives voters Republicans to laugh at! Some journalist say that the Tea Party is on the way out, but is the Tea Party really losing?<\/font><\/p>\n

\n

\"teabag-obscene\"<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

The emerging  <\/font><\/span>conventional wisdom<\/a><\/font><\/span> that the Tea Party is being vanquished by the GOP establishment, based solely on the fact it is beating primary challengers, is exceedingly myopic. If you believe that, you have a very superficial view of what constitutes \u201cwinning.\u201d  These primaries are forcing the allegedly mainstream candidates to move far to the right and the performance of the past few years proves that when this happens the Party  <\/strong><\/span>stays <\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/font>far right as a result of this threat<\/strong>.  <\/font><\/span>Primaries can be very effective tools if used properly, and if they are backed up by money and influence, which the far right certainly is, they are formidable instruments of discipline. <\/font><\/span><\/p>\n

Ed Kilgore did an excellent survey<\/a> <\/font><\/font>of these so-called victories for the voices of reason at Talking Points Memo earlier this week: <\/font><\/p>\n

Yesterday\u2019s winner Pat Roberts, who already sported lifetime ratings of 86 percent from both the American Conservative Union and Americans for Prosperity, went far out of his way to propitiate the ideological gods of movement conservatism as he fought for reelection. He voted against an appropriations measure that included a project he had long sought for his alma mater, Kansas State University, and opposed a UN Treaty banning discrimination against people with disabilities over the objections of his revered Kansas Senate predecessors Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum. <\/font><\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen the same dynamic with \u201cestablishment\u201d winners Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Joni Ernst of Iowa, and \u201cmoderate outsider\u201d David Perdue of Georgia \u2014 and above all Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, whose voting record tilted hard right in anticipation of his primary fight with Matt Bevin. There\u2019s been a virtual cavalcade in the primaries of entire fields tilting against debt limit increases, comprehensive immigration reform (or even limited legalization of undocumented workers), any positive government role in economic policy, and of course, any accommodations for legalized abortion or same-sex marriage. <\/font><\/p>\n

As Kilgore has pointed out endlessly on his blog at Washington Monthly, there really is very little daylight between them in the first place\u2026  <\/font><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Inserted from <AlterNet<\/a>><\/p>\n

This year, the so-called establishment Republicans are winning the primaries, but only because they have adopted the same extremist policies as the Tea Baggers.  Incumbents can take home a record of obstruction, sabotage and sedition that serves to insulate them from threats of TEAbuggery.  The 0.1% billionaires that tell the Tea Party what to think, what to say and who to hate are getting the same job performance from the so-called establishment candidates.  So the Tea Party isn\u2019t losing at all.  If this keeps up, Bought Bitch Mitch will have to change his name to Bought Bubba Bagger!<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2014 has far fewer Tea Party Republican candidates for the House and especially the Senate than they have recent elections.  I miss running against the likes of Sharon \u201cSecond Amendment Solution\u201d Angle, Christine \u201cI am not a witch\u201d O\u2019Donnell and Rick \u201cGoogle my name\u201d Santorum.  TEAbuggery can be damn useful at election time.  It gives […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}