The Tea Party and the Republican Establishment

I have lived in the same congressional district for over 30 years. In all of those years, there has never been a primary challenger. When I first moved in my representative was Chalmers Wylie who had been in office so long he probably remembered Lincoln. He finally retired after some of the Congressional scandals in the early 1990s. He was replaced by Deborah Pryce who retired in 2008. Even though I usually vote Republican, neither of these candidates represented me very well. Pryce, in particular, provided the margin of victory for some of President Clinton's early legislation that I did not agree with. She was also a consistent anti-gun vote. I would have loved to have traded her in for a more conservative candidate. But it never came up.

Ohio has a long history of suppressing primary challengers. They claim that it is to save the public money that would be spent on elections. The result has been a long line of establishment candidates - people who were moderates and who where known to work with the party. This has not always worked out.

For years Ken Blackwell wanted to run for governor. In 1998 he was the state Attorney Treasurer and the establishment candidate was secretary of State Robert Taft. The reasoning was that a) it was Taft's "turn", that he would work with the party establishment better than Blackwell and that c) the party owed the Taft family. After much negotiation, Blackwell agreed to run for Secretary of State and wait his turn. Few people said it in public but people who were familiar with Taft's job as Secretary of State felt that he was incompetent (I knew people who worked for him who echoed that assessment).

Taft ended up being a disaster. His administration was plagued with scandals that dragged down the entire Ohio Republican party and hurt the national party. By the time Blackwell got to run in 2006 the well had been poisoned and no Republican could win. While I do not agree with all of Blackwell's positions (gay marriage), I still think that he would have been a better governor.

The point to this is that the establishment candidate is not always the best candidate nor the one who best represents the districts views. Instead the candidate is the one who is best-connected to the central committee. The Democrats are no better. They do the same back-room deals.

I can't help but think of this when I see Karl Rove arguing that the Tea Party is nominating unelectable candidates. A decade ago Rove felt that there was no constituency for limited government candidates and engineered the ejection of the libertarian wing of the party in favor of big-spending Republicans. George W. Bush called them Compassionate Conservatives.

The Republicans need a new image, different from Bush and big government. The Tea Party is providing that and tapping into a national mood but it threatens the establishment' stranglehold on power. An ugly side has been revealed where the establishment would rather lose to a Democrat than to a conservative Republican. This is self-serving and self-destructive. It also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when they refuse to support a candidate because he is "unelectable".