We may not be clairvoyant and so can't say who will be House Speaker Boehner's replacement, but we can say this: we know one person it won't be, Eric Cantor. How quick his fortunes have changes is stunning. The GOP establishment has been able to win a number of primaries until now, one big one was Mitch McConnell in Kentucky.
The defeat of Cantor though is shocking on a number of levels. For one thing it shows that in today's Republican party the most accurate thing to say about the Tea party is live by the sword die by the sword. Just four years ago the Tea Party made Cantor and now it's broken him.
It's scarcely possible to exaggerate what a big upset this is. The irony is that South Carolina's Lindsay Graham had been preparing himself for a Tea Party challenge since 2010 and won easily. Cantor was supposed to win easily and got beaten by a good margin.
What this does is greatly complicate the narrative that the GOP establishment has taken command this year. Until now there had been just one establishment loss to a Tea Party primary.
"Previously, only one House incumbent had lost a primary this year: 91-year-old Ralph Hall in Texas.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/2014-virginia-primary-eric-cantor-five-takeaways-107694.html#ixzz34Jmjio8y
The defeat of Cantor though is shocking on a number of levels. For one thing it shows that in today's Republican party the most accurate thing to say about the Tea party is live by the sword die by the sword. Just four years ago the Tea Party made Cantor and now it's broken him.
It's scarcely possible to exaggerate what a big upset this is. The irony is that South Carolina's Lindsay Graham had been preparing himself for a Tea Party challenge since 2010 and won easily. Cantor was supposed to win easily and got beaten by a good margin.
What this does is greatly complicate the narrative that the GOP establishment has taken command this year. Until now there had been just one establishment loss to a Tea Party primary.
"Previously, only one House incumbent had lost a primary this year: 91-year-old Ralph Hall in Texas.
Cantor’s loss, the first time this has ever happened to a House majority leader, comes just one week after conservative state Sen. Chris McDaniel forced a June 24 runoff against Sen. Thad Cochran in Mississippi."
"Tuesday was the symbolic halfway point of primary season. The “establishment strikes back” narrative that has dominated since Sen. John Cornyrn crushed Steve Stockman in the Texas GOP Senate primary this March needs to be readjusted."
"This may embolden activists in states where incumbents had looked safe. Milton Wolf, running for Senate in Kansas, put out a statement saying: “On August 5th, it’s Pat Roberts’ turn,” referring to the third-term Republican senator."
"Democrats, meanwhile, noted that Cantor has been one of leading obstructionists of the Obama agenda and cited his defeat as proof that the tea party has taken over the GOP."
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/2014-virginia-primary-eric-cantor-five-takeaways-107694.html#ixzz34Jmjio8y
This is going to cause reverberations in the GOP. The assumption now is that immigration reform is now dead-though it never seemed too alive anyway. However, it must be admitted that what we saw last night is in large part unprecedented: a House Majority Leader has never gone done to a primary challenge before. It seems to me that this may mark a watershed moment in American politics.
It demonstrates once and for all that the Republican party is not going to change, that it can never change and that the country is more bifurcated and fissured than ever. I think what this is will turn out to be the moment the Republican party internally implodes. The party can't change though we were hearing in 2012 that it would learn something from Romney. Two years later it couldn't be more clear that they haven't learned anything.
The leadership might want to learn something but it's the party's voters and activists who won't let this happen. So I'm thinking that in time this will bode very well for the Democrats. Ok, maybe now 'immigration reform is dead' but who honestly thought it was alive before this anyway? It will be interesting to see how wide the ripple this causes. Will this truly lead to more Tea Party candidates sweeping out the establishment? From a Democratic standpoint perhaps that's the best outcome possible as it will give the GOP candidates that are too Far Right for the general electorate.
There's something about the Tea Party not necessarily voting in their own best interests that made me think of this joke about Soviet Russia (caution: I'm going to butcher this joke, but hopefully the core idea will get through):
ReplyDeleteA party official / genie in a bottle / some entity with lots of power tells a Russian peasant that she will grant him any wish, but that his neighbor will get double what he gets: so he can wish for a pretty young bride, but his neighbor will thus get two pretty young brides, etc. The peasant thinks for a while... reluctant to have his neighbor end up better off than himself, when he finally comes up with a solution: "I want to be blinded in one eye!"