And depending on how you look at it, that can be seen as a huge mistake or an inadvertent strategic coup.
Ford O'Connell and Steve Pearson have an interesting piece in today's Daily Caller point out, the GOP had one of the largest enthusiasm gaps ever,and they had the issues. The GOP’s donors, especially in the rank and file donated sufficient money. And there were viable Republican candidates running in the bluest of districts.
What happened as I've mentioned before is that it came down to insufficient ground game and Get Out The Vote(GOTV) efforts in a lot of areas - but especially in Nevada, Washington and Colorado.
O'Connell and Pearson quite rightly put that squarely on the shoulders of Michael Steele and the RNC:
Getting voters to the polls in states like Colorado, Nevada and Washington is where the GOP really fell short this year, and that responsibility lies primarily with the Republican National Committee (RNC), which early on telegraphed that it would be cutting back on its GOTV program and later announced it wouldn’t be sending Capitol Hill staffers to the field this year. The Republican Governors Association (RGA) filled in some of the money gap, but lacks the infrastructure and manpower to offset the RNC’s pullback.
While the state parties share some of the blame, the fact is that the RNC did very little to work the territory this year. For instance, the RNC put a lot of eggs in one very questionable basket labeled 'California' - eight million, to be exact - while ignoring infinitely more winnable races in Nevada, Washington and Colorado. And the rot spread down ticket. Tea Party Candidates Sharron Angle in Nevada and Ken Buck in Colorado were not the only ones to suffer from the RNC's mismanagement. Only one state senate race each was won in those two states.
So..was this sabotage, stupidity or genius? Probably a mixture of all three.
The RNC is the voice of the Republican establishment, and thanks to Michael Steele,it's become a good example of mismanagement as well.The national GOP and establishment Republicans basically threw candidates like Angle, Christine O'Donnell and Ken Buck to the wolves, and Joe Miller in Alaska as well, although it increasingly looks like he's going to win.Did anyone in the GOP leadership discipline Lisa Murkowski in any way for refusing to abide by the results of the party primary? Nope!
The motivation behind that is obvious.The GOP establishment wanted to lessen the Tea Party and Sarah Palin's influence. So by deliberately hanging some Tea Party candidates out to dry and having establishment pundits like Karl Rove attack the Tea Party for 'losing us the Senate' they accomplished that. People may call Karl Rove a 'genius', but I don't see anything but stupidity in attacking your party's nominee after the primary, as Rove did with Christine O'Donnell.Flawed as she may have been, there was no excuse for the way the NRSC and the RNC behaved after she won.
And now we get to the inadvertent genius part.
If the Tea party Senate candidates had all won their seats, the GOP would control both the House and the Senate, the latter by a very bare margin, but not the White House. Which means that Obama could veto anything of substance, leaving them to take the blame for what is likely to still be a poisonous economy and high unemployment in 2012. And then campaign for re-election against the Evil Republican Congress who obstructed him.
So how would you prevent this sorry scenario if you were in charge?
You'd make sure you control the House, and allow the Dems to keep a small minority in the Senate - not enough to get anything through, especially since the GOP controls the House but enough so that there's shared responsibility and an impetus in 2012 to go for a reral majority, when both the White House and 23 Democrat Senate seats are up for grabs.
And you'd make sure that Harry Reid is re-elected so he'll continue being the face of the Senate to the voting public, and if you're really lucky, Nancy Pelosi stays on as House Minority Leader.
Even better (from the RINO establishment point of view) you throw a spike in those damned Tea Party insurgents and remind them whenever they get unruly why the GOP doesn't control the Senate.
The end result? Control of the House, near control of the Senate and the responsibility for governing still in the hands of the Democrats. But with spending control in the hands of the GOP, a good position to take control of the Senate in 2012, the ability to totally gridlock the government and have the blame fall on the Democrats and Obama.
I'm absolutely positive this was not a plan on th epart of theRINO establishment, but it could work out quite well. Especially since th eTea Party insurgents aren't going anywhere.
As I'm sure you can tell, part of this is an effort to make lemonade out of the proverbial lemons, but not all losses are defeats, as Clausewitz would have said.
If the Republicans stay true to what they were sent to DC-land to do, clean out the rot from the RNC and refurbish their state party organizations where that needs to be done, 2012 could end up really being the mega-wave election..especially with a great conservative presidential candidate on the ticket.
Love it -- and especially the cartoon.
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