Primary Politics: Can the Grassroots Defeat the GOP Establishment in 2014?

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Interesting developments: Matt Bevin is challenging Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in the Kentucky GOP primary.

Checking his biography, I’m glad to see that Bevin is a graduate of Washington & Lee University, a U.S. Army veteran, and a small business owner — exactly the kind of outsider “not a politician” profile anyone would want in a Tea Party candidate. If grassroots conservatives in Kentucky rally behind Bevin, I think we can start chilling the champagne for Mitch McConnell’s retirement party. However, defeating the party’s Senate leader in a primary would be completely unprecedented.

If this is Star Wars, Luke Skywalker and the rebel alliance can’t expect Darth Vader to surrender the Empire without a fight. Or can we?

FLASHBACK MAY 2009:

We were standing outside the Continental Lounge in Rosslyn, Va., while the young Republican operative explained it to me.
“All they care about is getting their chairmanships back, and they don’t care how they get there,” said the operative. “They don’t want to spend any money, so they were looking for a self-funder.”
“They” are Republican senators, and what my friend was explaining was the otherwise inexplicable decision of the National Republican Senatorial Committee to endorse Charlie Crist in the Florida Senate race — 15 months before the primary!

Ah, those heady days of 2009, when the Tea Party uprising was a new and untested force in American political life, when Marco Rubio was 35 points behind Charlie Crist in the polls and supporters of that unknown underdog Marco Rubio were told he had no chance!

Rubio’s role in the “Gang of Eight” has rather tarnished his reputation among conservatives, but thank God he beat Charlie Crist, eh?

Nothing could be more corrupt than the shabby deal whereby John Cornyn, the NRSC and Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer — I pause to spit on the ground — lined up behind Crist in May 2009.

The “Not One Red Cent” rebellion was the first shot of a guerrilla struggle, with the Tea Party grassroots as the ragtag insurgents in a long war for control of the Republican Party that has not ended yet, and won’t end — cannot end — until the rebels have utterly vanquished the Beltway GOP Establishment and their go-along-to-get-along philosophy of bipartisan compromise. There is nothing that the present-day Democrat Party believes in that any patriotic American can endorse, and all talk of “bipartisanship” is anathema.

You cannot defeat Democrats by promising to cooperate with Democrats, and the GOP’s corrupt compromisers must be replaced by a new generation of conservatives who understand a very old idea: Give voters a choice, not an echo, as Phyllis Schalfly said in 1964.

To hell with anyone who says the politics of principle is unrealistic, who argues that it is a “smart” and pragmatic thing for Republicans to position themselves as the “Me, Too” party, promising voters a more efficient Welfare State — Democrat Lite, as it were.

The Democrat are wrong, their liberal policy agenda is bad, and Republicans need not apologize for being the party of Right and Good.

Mid-term elections are always more about the grassroots than are the pursuit of independent “swing” voters that is typical of those gaudy national spectacles of a presidential campaign. Turnout is always lower in the mid-terms. So-called low-information voters — who are usually counted in opinion polls as undecided, “don’t know/don’t care” — can be spurred to vote in a presidential election by emotional appeals to do their patriotic duty as citizens. But it is very difficult to explain to these disaffected and ill-informed people why electing congressmen and senators and state legislators is ultimately important to the future of the country. And it is only in closely contested “swing” states that the parties make any real effort to mobilize voters even in a presidential campaign.

Understanding this factor is crucial to evaluating the stakes in 2014. In a deeply “red” state like Kentucky in a mid-term election, there is comparatively little chance that a bruising primary fight for the GOP Senate nomination will damage Republican prospects in November 2014. If Matt Bevin can somehow mobilize the kind of grassroots support necessary to defeat Mitch McConnell in the primary, Bevin will stomp Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes in the general election the way Godzilla stomped Tokyo.

Conservatives therefore need not listen to any scaredy-cat talk that support for Matt Bevin will endanger Republican hopes for capturing control of the Senate in 2014. The GOP Establishment will encourage such fears, and the liberal media will cheerfully publicize such talk, in exactly the same way the same people claimed that the Tea Party uprising of 2009-2010 was bad for Republicans. Yet the result in November 2010 was a historic landslide victory for Republicans, and if John Boehner doesn’t understand that he owes his control of the House Speaker’s gavel to the conservative grassroots, how better to remind Boehner of this fact than to send his Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell into early retirement?

Simple message for you, Mister Speaker: You could be next.

All of these thoughts were inspired by Erick Erickson’s commentary on his encounter with an NRSC representative at this past weekend’s Red State Gathering  in New Orleans.

What Erick relates is unfortunate on all sides. The NRSC operative was, we may suppose, just following orders, and Erick and I have had more than a few disputes in the past couple of years. But my own position in the fundamental question that Erick addresses hasn’t changed since 2009, when he and I were in 100% agreement: The NRSC should stay the hell out of contested Republican primaries, period.

Set aside any question of ideology, friendship or personal interest, and what it comes down to is this: Either the Republican Party represents an active and organic popular movement — a principled and patriotic opposition to the corrupt agenda of the Democrats — or else the GOP is simply a vehicle of careerist political ambition.

A top-down party controlled by insiders motivated by their narrow private interests cannot expect the kind of committed loyalty that a genuinely principled grassroots movement inspires. For the NRSC to go meddling in a primary — even on behalf of the Senate Minority Leader — is anathema to the kind of grassroots party the GOP must be, if it is ever to defeat the Democrats and become a governing majority again.

If Mitch McConnell wants to be re-nominated as the Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky, let him spend his own campaign funds and mobilize his own resources for that purpose, and not dishonestly use national party resources against Matt Bevin.

And frankly, I think the spectacle of a contested primary can and should be averted altogether: Mitch McConnell should retire.

No hard feelings, Senator. Cash in your chips and walk away from the table, take up a gig at a think tank or lobby shop, collect your pension and appear on TV as an “elder statesman.” I’m sure Fox News would pay you a nice six-figure salary as a commentator.

There is a quite recent precedent, after all.

Last November, when the Retire #Taxby Chambliss movement began, nobody imagined it might actually happen, but it did, didn’t it?

Is this crazy? Of course it is. But everybody told us we were crazy to imagine that Marco Rubio could defeat Charlie Crist.

Until this morning, I’d never even heard the name Matt Bevin. All I know about him is what I’ve quickly skimmed from his Web site biography, and frankly I don’t give a damn about whatever his political “negatives” might be. This isn’t really about Matt Bevin. It’s not about Mitch McConnell. It’s not about Erick Erickson. This is about America’s future, and we are not a nation built by timid and fearful souls.

Here’s the way I see it: We’re playing Texas Hold ‘Em. It’s been one of those long nights — win a little, lose a little, up and down, never a chance to rake a big pot. The chips are dwindling. No guts, no glory, so if we get any kind of a decent hand, we might as well go all-in.

Folks, as crazy as this may seem, I think that if we will all rally behind Matt Bevin — and rally now — Mitch McConnell will announce by Christmas that he won’t seek re-election to the Senate.

No contested primary, no wasted resources, no hard feelings, just a changing of the guard, and a passing of the torch.

This development will shock the daylights out of the GOP Beltway Establishment, which has “tamed” Marco Rubio and thought they had domesticated the Tea Party movement.

Do we want bipartisan compromise?

Do we want Democrat Lite? Go along to get along?

Not just “no” — hell, no. All in!

 

MATT BEVIN for U.S. SENATE

 


142 comments

  4. Agree whole heartedly on this one.
    We also need some work on the primary opposition to Miss Grahamnesty. While Mace’s name makes a nice campaign jingle, I don’t want to give support to someone that will be little better than Grahamnesty.

  5. The best I can do from California is cheer the insurgents on, and hope they don’t turn out like Rubio seems to be.

  6. It’s simple, QM, even if it seems counter-intuitive: If we want to take out Graham, the first thing we have to do is take out Mitch. Take the queen, and we’ll get the rook later.

    Rally on Matt Bevin, get the blogs behind him, raise him a couple million dollars online, and let Mitch see the handwriting on the wall. By Christmas, as I say, when the polls show a surge for Bevin, Mitch will announce he won’t seek re-election.

    And then we turn our attention to South Carolina.

    Good-bye, Miss Grahamnesty!

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