After Scott Brown’s upset senate victory in Massachusetts, everyone — left and right — is left wondering how big an omen it is for November. In the Tuesday Republican primary for the Illinois governor’s race, Adam Andrzejewski may provide the answer. . . .
He is backed by Tea Party activists statewide and has never held elective office, an asset for many people in this political environment. There may be some who believe that the political machine is simply too powerful for a political outsider to break. But in this new landscape, the machine’s limitations and deep fractures have never been more apparent. . . .
In November, the morning after Election Day, a conservative blogger in Georgia blasted an e-mail to 65,000 people.
Erick Erickson’s 5 a.m. “Morning Briefing” seemed counterintuitive — the election of a Democrat to a U.S. House seat in Upstate New York held by Republicans for more than a century, he wrote, was “a huge win for conservatives.”
Yet the missive immediately was posted online by the conservative publication Human Events, a corporate sibling of Erickson’s blog, RedState. It next reached the Web site of the American Spectator magazine, whose publisher, Alfred S. Regnery, sits on the board of the conservative publishing house that owns RedState and Human Events.
Ricocheting inside the Beltway, Erickson’s analysis fueled discussion later that morning at two influential weekly meetings of D.C. conservatives. Next, it was endorsed by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, considered by many conservatives the ultimate authority. “We kept a horrible Republican from possibly winning,” Limbaugh said. . . .
With the Democratic defeat in the recent special senatorial election in Massachusetts, engineered in part by tea-party activists working with several Beltway-based groups, the conservative movement is more energized than it has been in years. . . .
Such coordination is increasing. Inside the Beltway, much of it is fueled by the Conservative Action Project (CAP), a new group of conservative leaders chaired by Reagan-era attorney general Edwin Meese III. CAP, whose influential memos “for the movement” circulate on Capitol Hill, is an offshoot of the Council for National Policy, a highly secretive organization of conservative leaders and donors.
“There is a definite sense that the various parts of the conservative movement are coming together,” said Regnery, a leading CAP member.
Adam Andrzejewski refers to his opponents in the Illinois Republican primary as “the Redcoats,” while calling his own grassroots campaign for governor “the ragtag army.”
Revolutionary War metaphors come easily for Andrzejewski, whose showing Tuesday in Illinois will provide an early test of the ability of Tea Party activists to deliver votes in Republican primaries during this year’s mid-term campaign. . . .
Like George Washington’s ill-equipped colonial soldiers outnumbered by the professional troops of the British Empire, Andrzejewski finds himself up against more experienced foes in the gubernatorial race. His opponents in the seven-candidate primary include veteran state Sen. Kirk Dillard and former state GOP chairman Andy McKenna. Yet their experience may actually prove a liability in Illinois, a state plagued by corruption scandals, including the one that led to last year’s impeachment of former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich.
“My opponents have 100 years of combined Illinois political experience,” Andrzejewski said in a telephone interview Sunday. “I ask one question on the trail: Do you feel Illinois is running well? Nobody in 11 months has raised their hand.” . . .
UPDATE: While I was on the phone with Andrzejewski yesterday, he told me he was late for another interview — with Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit. I told Andrzejewski, “Tell Jim I said to say hello to Charles Johnson. He’ll understand.” Inside-blogging jokes aside, here’s a video clip from Jim’s exclusive interview with Andrzejewski:
First, there’s no way to verify the numbers in a campaign’s internal polls. These are tools the campaign uses for its own purposes, and not intended for public consumption. Obviously, after last week’s PPP survey showed Andrzejewski 8 points behind Kirk Dillard, the Andrzejewski campaign wants to counter the perception that their candidate is trailing. And there are certainly reasons to believe the race has tightened, as I reported:
Since [the PPP poll was released], Dillard has come under heavy criticism for appearing in a 2008 campaign commercial for Obama, and Andrzejewski says his own campaign has gained ground.
“We feel we’re either within the margin of error or leading the race right now,” said the Tea Party candidate, adding that he senses “panic” among his rivals in the crowded primary field. “We think 22 percent wins the race. Anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 votes — in a state of 13 million — will win the nomination. The bar is that low.”
Which brings us to the second reason I didn’t include the internal poll: In this kind of situation– seven candidates in a tight race, on the eve of a February primary — polls don’t really mean much. It’s about turnout at this point, and the difference between victory and defeat may come down to a few hundred votes. That’s why the Andrzejewski mailer featuring Lech Walesa’s endorsement is so important.
If they’ve actually targeted that to more than 200,000 Polish-American households in Illinois, as a campaign source told me last week, that could prove decisive. Memories of Poland’s Cold War struggle against Soviet domination are strongest with older voters and, as my brother once remarked to me, “Old people vote.”
Everybody talks about getting out the “youth vote,” but senior citizens are always more likely to turn out in primary. And the appeal of a clean-cut young Polish-American success story endorsed by Lech Walesa . . . Well, that’s got to be worth a few thousand votes, right?
Earlier today I did a phone interview with Illinois gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrzejewski — he was at a rally near St. Louis where Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit was on the scene — and I’ll have that story in a few hours. Meanwhile, here are images of the Andrzejewski mailer featuring Lech Walesa, which campaign sources tell me was sent to more than 200,000 Polish-American voters in Illinois:
And here is the closing TV ad airing before Tuesday’s primary:
That’s just one report from Massillon, Ohio, but it’s everywhere now. When Howard Zinn became a good Commie this week, comments pointed out that Zinn’s Marxist history is now standard reading in high school advanced-placement (AP) classes.
For decades, public schools have been a laboratory where America’s children are used as guinea pigs for the experimental education projects of the elite. And what is astonishing is that so many parents tell themselves, “Oh, that stuff’s not going on in my kid’s school.”
Well, it is. If you’re too stupid to realize it, you’re part of the problem. There is no point trying to “fix” the system, because the system itself is the problem, as Ray Moore explained more than a decade ago:
“Christians have got to come to grips with the fact that the government is not going to fix the schools. The government is causing the problem,” says the Rev. E. Ray Moore Jr., national director of Exodus 2000, an organization formed in 1997 to encourage parents and churches to choose Christian education instead of public schools.
“Each effort to fix [public education] makes things worse,” says Mr. Moore, an Army Reserve chaplain who served in the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The problems of the “government school” system, as Mr. Moore calls it, are “terminal, and the quicker Christian people realize it, the quicker they’ll be able to take action.”
Get your kids out of public schools, now. Tomorrow may be too late.
Update: (Smitty) SondraK underscores Stacy’s point, in a postcard from the edge.
Rule 5 Sunday, and a chance to accentuate the positive. The weather yesterday was frightful, but today is sunny, and we’ve a pleasant, relaxing show to lift the spirits:Continue reading Rule 5 Sunday →
