I agree that Nikki Haley’s campaign should be a model for future GOP candidates on what to do – while the Angle/Buck/O’Donnell/Miller fiascos are textbook examples on how not to run a campaign. Haley was smeared by the GOP Establishment with claims of adultery, yet she was experienced enough to stick to the issues and not get dragged down int0 the mud and you would never see her in a commercial declaring “I am not a witch”. We should not be surprised that populist campaigns are often rife with amateur mistakes, however we need to draw the right lessons from them. South Carolina is a good example of a dilemma – on the one hand you have Lindsey Graham who is an obstructionist and a pseudo liberal who follows the John McCain playbook, on the other hand you have Jim De Mint who made the outrageous comment that you cannot be a fiscal conservative without being a social conservative thereby telling Independents and libertarians to take a hike, he also said he would rather have only 30 Republican Senators as long as they thought like him – a prefect game plan for permanent minority status.
by J.R. Dunn
It’s taken a good part of the past week for the breadth of the conservative achievement in the midterms to sink in. Over sixty new House seats, six Senate seats (we can safely say, no matter what occurs in Alaska, since Murkowski is a member of the Murkowski Party representing only Murkowski), thirty-plus statehouses, and no fewer than twenty “trifectas” — that is, states in which the GOP owns the House, Senate, and governorship. The 2010 election was a victory both broad and deep, one that will be paying dividends for years to come.
It could have been better. Anything, in this imperfect world, can be better. The failings, needless to say, have drawn the attention of the media and the left, along with renegades such as David Frum, who have crowed over them as triumphs, as if retaining Harry Reid is something to be proud of. This has convinced the Democrats to continue banging their collective head against that same leftward stretch of wall. Evidently, both Reid and the most successful speaker since Cicero, Nancy Pelosi, are to be retained as party leaders. That too is a product of victory.
It’s quite true that Sharron Angle should have beaten Reid and that Joe Miller should have beaten the repellent Murkowski (with Specter and Grayson gone, certainly the most odious politician of either party) in a walk. Neither came anywhere near. In Colorado, Ken Buck was barely edged out, which can happen under any circumstances. As for Christine O’Donnell, she never really had a chance in hyper-liberal Delaware, quite apart from the fact that “endearingly odd” is not a compelling senatorial persona.
Could these defeats have been avoided? With the exception of Christine O., I think so. What we’re dealing with is the type of error that comes with lack of experience. The failings in the cases of both Angle and Miller were self-inflicted, involving gaffes that an experienced candidate would have known to avoid. This is something that future Tea Party candidates — that is to say, candidates emerging from outside the traditional political class, and lacking the experience of that class — will need to consider and overcome.
Most of these difficulties involved presentation. A number of TP candidates made remarks that they came to regret. Rand Paul’s notorious comment on the unconstitutionality of the 1964 civil rights act might have sunk him if he’d followed it with anything similar. Luckily, he seems to have realized this (or perhaps Dad straightened him out), and he sailed through with no more such errors, praise be to Aqua Buddha.
Not so with Sharron Angle, who made an entire series of obtuse blurts culminating in a remark to a classroom of Hispanic children that she “didn’t know what country they were from,” a comment unworthy of her and one which helped seal her defeat by the obnoxious Harry Reid. This has been widely attributed to personality flaws on Angle’s part, but I don’t think that’s entirely fair. There’s a tradition among populist movements, of which the Tea Parties are the latest example, to speak forthrightly without self-censorship as a contrast to the euphemisms and verbal formulae of the political establishment. While there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, it can lead to problems. It is often abused, as is constantly seen in public meetings where someone gets up and starts bellowing about “wetbacks” or the like, embarrassing the entire assembly and enabling the media to label all present Neanderthals. Or, as we saw in this recent campaign, populist candidates forget that the general public is not familiar with populist usage and may mistake straightforward comments for something else, which is precisely what happened with both Paul and Angle. We need to keep in mind that discretion is not an evil in and of itself and that forthrightness is a tactic not suitable to all circumstances.
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Consider Nikki Haley in contrast. Haley was badgered even more consistently and vilely by her establishment Republican opponents. She scarcely acknowledged the attacks and ran a classy campaign, so doubts never crystallized around her despite the best attempts of the media to run with the adultery stories. Future Tea Party candidates should closely study the Haley campaign, which in many ways can serve as a model on how to prevail in a universally hostile political environment.
They should also pay close attention to experienced politicians and operatives, whether they fully share their views or not. These people possess a universe of irreplaceable knowledge that must not be thrown away. Tea Party candidates are in the position of amateurs who must develop professional capabilities without losing their amateur virtues. Professional political figures can aid immensely in this task. While the GOP handled many TP candidacies poorly, in the wake of 2010, this is not likely to recur. There has been a lot of loose talk since the election calling for open warfare on GOP figures for trivial reasons or none at all. This is asinine — nothing can save the left at this point other than a civil war on the right. Much of this chatter appears to be coming from provocateurs, mixing as it does sheer vituperation with obvious ignorance of conservative politics. It would be best to simply ignore it.
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And yet this ultraconservative state features one of the most ultra-liberal political establishments in the country, typified by the RINO sisters, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe. Nobody foresaw this as changing anytime soon, and certainly not as early as 2010. But changed it has with the gubernatorial victory of Paul LePage, a Tea Party man, along with the conquest of both legislative houses. The state of Maine has come under Republican control for the first time in fifty years.
This naturally leads us to ask: if Maine, why not West Virginia and Arkansas? The GOP has for far too long followed a policy of leaving liberal control of such states unchallenged. Why, I’m not sure. Perhaps out of judicious husbanding of resources, perhaps out of fear that the Dems would retaliate. Whatever the case, the recovery of Maine proves any such policy to be mistaken and shortsighted. Arkansas and West Virginia should be targeted as soon as 2012 and remain on the list until they are flipped at last. The Tea Parties are the perfect vehicle for carrying out such a strategy. Nonpartisan, impeccably middle-class, untainted by Republican flaws, capable of persuading where career pols would fail, the TPs can go where formal political parties cannot. The Maine example must not be ignored. There should be no privileged sanctuaries where the likes of Robert Byrd can set themselves up as state Grand Kleagle in perpetuity.
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