Wednesday, February 03, 2010

"We're Comin' to Get You": NY-23 and VA-5


The Intellectual Activist

An Objectivist Review

"We're Comin' to Get You": NY-23 and VA-5

By Robert Tracinski


Following Scott Brown's victory in Massachusetts and the collapse of the Democrats' statist agenda in Congress, the greatest danger to the Republican Party is complacency, a sense that they are destined to be swept back into power in November.

In fact, the most brutal bloodletting in the near future may be within the Republican Party itself. The same "tea party" rebellion against big government that swept a Republican into power in far-left-leaning Massachusetts is also bringing forth insurgent challengers against establishment Republicans in the party's primaries. You can see that in the new poll that shows challenger Marco Rubio pulling ahead of Charlie Crist in the Republican Senate primary in Florida. Crist is no aloof, entitled Martha Coakley; he's a personable campaigner and a popular governor. Yet his support for President Obama's free-spending "stimulus" bill earned him the enmity of the "tea party" patriots. And in the last year, it is the tea party movement that has wielded the decisive balance of power in American politics.

I recently landed in the middle of another important skirmish: the wide-open Republican primary battle in Virginia's fifth congressional district. The story is a microcosm of the tension and mutual suspicion between the tea party movement and the Republican establishment.


THE COMPLETE ARTICLE

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