Playing to Win

The Tea Parties Serve Notice to the Republican Establishment

by Robert Tracinski

I think it may have been Lenin who once outlined his plan for revolution by saying that first they would go after the reactionaries—and then they would go after the insufficiently enthusiastic.

On Tuesday, the Tea Parties went after the insufficiently enthusiastic.

In the latest Republican primary upset—we're up to about eight of them now—Christine O'Donnell, the obscure Tea-Party-backed candidate for Delaware's Senate seat, defeated Mike Castle, a well-known Delaware politician backed by the Republican establishment.

This victory was worth winning even if Republicans end up losing a Senate seat they were likely to win. (Castle had a big lead in the polls over the Democratic nominee, while O'Donnell goes into the general election as an underdog.) It was worth it because the real target in Delaware wasn't the Democratic Party. The real target is the Republican Party.

The Washington political and media establishment quickly understood that the Tea Party movement would produce an anti-Democratic wave in November. What they have been slow to understand is that the first item on the Tea Parties' political agenda is to clean out the Republican Party. The Tea Partiers aren't just outraged at the Democrats' lurch toward socialism. They are outraged at not having been offered better alternatives by the Republican establishment. So they are setting out to topple that establishment.

The question the Tea Partiers want to resolve is: who serves whom? Do the Tea Parties serve the Republican Party, or had the Republicans better start making sure they serve the agenda of the Tea Parties? Yesterday's vote in Delaware provides the answer.

It may look like the Tea Parties have overplayed their hand by setting up a possible Republican loss in Delaware. On the other hand, this is a year in which anything can happen. And on a deeper level, whatever the results in the general election, the Tea Parties are playing to win—not for a political party, but for a cause.

Jack Wakeland sent me a note that puts it well: "Backing Christine O'Donnell is not the act of a calculating political party organization selecting the candidate most likely to win. It is the act of people pursuing a cause. If the Tea Party movement can sponsor candidates in the GOP primary and support them all of the way through to victory in the general election in a center-left state like Delaware, Congress may actually behave differently. And in January 2013—after we have rid ourselves of President Obama—this kind of a congressional majority might offer more than yet another impotent and purely symbolic gesture of defiance against the growing leviathan. Rather than just trim its growth rate, they might actually cut the size of government.

"It is that vision that keeps the Tea Party movement going. They want nothing less. They are playing to win."

One of the best reports on the Delaware primary—courtesy of RealClearPolitics, which is now doing its own original election reporting—hits all of the essential points. It quotes an O'Donnell supporter who declares, "We could care less about the Republican Party. We want our government back."

It also correctly identifies why Castle lost. It wasn't because voters particularly loved O'Donnell or thought she was perfect. He lost because of his record, and because of one vote in particular. As one of Castle's own friends confessed to RealClearPolitics, "The root of all of his problems was [Castle's] cap and tax vote. He's the most popular politician in the state of Delaware, yet he lost the Republican primary. To me, that says it all." You know, when your friends call the program "cap and tax," maybe you should reconsider your vote. But Castle refused to renounce his support for cap-and-trade.

The Republican establishment has depended for too long on the presumption that pro-free-market voters will hold our noses and vote for their wishy-washy statist "moderates" simply because they're not as bad as the Democrats. Now the Tea Parties have turned the tables. Their challenge to the moderate Republican establishment is: you will now have to hold your nose and vote for our candidate in order to keep the Democrats out of office.

The dirty little secret, especially in northeastern states, is that some establishment Republicans will go over to the Democrats—even if that means backing ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, and everything else. We've already seen that with the defection of Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, with Charlie Crist's independent run in Florida, and with Lisa Murkowski's sore-loser write-in campaign in Alaska. And now in Delaware, we get a Republican establishment candidate who, according to the report by RealClearPolitics, called the Democratic candidate before he called O'Donnell to concede to her. And it gets worse:

In Wilmington, Republican strategist Don Mell and his wife, Jeanne, who is a Democrat, walked across the street from Castle's party to [Democratic candidate Chris] Coons' primary watch party at a nearby pub. The couple donned Castle pins when they arrived at the Coons event and picked up one of the Democrat's yard signs. "I'm not voting for that woman—she's crazy," Don Mell said. "There isn't going to be any discussion about that."

I have to concede that O'Donnell has real problems as a candidate—not ideologically, but in a checkered personal and financial record. Will that be an embarrassment to the Republicans and to the Tea Parties? Well, on the other hand, the Democrats have Charlie Rangel and yet another congressman caught stealing from Congressional Black Caucus charities. But like I said, whether or not O'Donnell wins is not the point. The point is not even whether the Republicans gain a majority in the Senate. I would certainly like to see such a majority, if only so that James Inhofe can come back as chairman of Environment and Public Works and launch a searing set of congressional hearings on Climategate. I certainly think we might be able to reach that goal even without Delaware.

But we should also remember that a Republican congressional majority next year won't be able to accomplish very much in tangible terms. They won't be able to stop a Democratic filibuster or override a presidential veto. So we need to be focused on the longer term. It will take another election to replace the president, and another election after that before we have had a chance to vote on every seat in the Senate. Our focus should be less on what the Senate looks like in 2011 than on what it will look like in 2013 and beyond. It's worth giving up one Senate seat now, if it will help push the entire Senate to the right over the coming years.

That should be the big message from the Tea Party grassroots to the Republican establishment. Don't send us any more Mike Castles. We're going to vote for someone who stands for the principles of limited government and who is radical enough to really be willing to shrink the size and power of the state. If you think a Christine O'Donnell has a lot of personal "baggage" and that her personality makes her unelectable, fine—then send us someone better who stands for the same principles. But our principles are the one thing we're not going to bend on.

That's what it means to play to win.

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