One of our rpf members, aclove, has written a great article for a local online outlet "Pundit House" here in NC.
The result is that Mark Pellin of Pundit House has asked him to join him online with Christian Hine on Pete Kaliner's radio show 5-12-2010 at 9PM as a member of the "House Update" panel from Pundit House. He'll be talking about Rand Paul's primary race in Kentucky.
Link to archived show: http://www.wbt.com/pete/archive/deta...tryID=10112846
Here's the piece he wrote: (which has been posted all over fbWe're kinda proud of him hereabouts....
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The Most Important GOP Primary You've Never Heard Of
Much has been written over the past year about the ongoing “civil war” within the Republican Party. To a certain extent, this is hyperbole; Democrats and much of the mainstream media outlets in this country would love nothing better than to see the GOP tear itself apart in an ideological bloodletting, driving either moderates or conservatives out and leading to a smaller, less effective party. The hope, of course, is that if this happens, it’s the moderates who will be driven out of the party, since moderates, more than conservatives, would be ripe for recruitment by the Democrats. The defection of Arlen Specter last year was presented as the first of many hoped-for pickups by Democrats of Republicans who suddenly found themselves on the wrong side of a burgeoning resurgence of fiscal conservatives within the GOP.
The campaign of Marco Rubio in Florida is one widely-touted example of a Tea Party-influenced candidate running an insurgent campaign against a Republican moderate. Rubio started off in June of last year more than 30 points behind Florida Governor Charlie Crist, but despite Crist having the endorsement of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Rubio was more than 30 points ahead by mid-April of this year. Faced with few options, Crist abandoned the GOP on April 28th and announced that he will run in the general election as an independent.
Just last weekend, Tea Party-affiliated GOP delegates in Utah nailed the scalp of Senator Bob Bennett to their wall at the Utah GOP State Convention. Citing his vote in favor of the TARP bank bailout last year, Tea Partiers (who made up 2/3 of the voting delegates) eliminated Bennett on the second ballot, disqualifying him from eligibility to compete in the Utah Republican Primary election, to be held June 22nd.
So what are we to make of all this? Is the story of the Tea Party movement (at least as it relates to the Republican Party) the story of conservatives angered over the bailouts, stimulus, and health care debates of the last year, casting out GOP moderates? Does that make Florida the central front of the “Republican Civil War?”
Personally, I don’t think so.
There’s another Senate primary race that hasn’t gotten nearly as much ink as the Florida race, and in my opinion, it’s one that has the potential to have much larger ramifications with regards to what the Republican Party is and what it stands for. Of the big three conservative commentators, only Glenn Beck has mentioned it; Rush and Hannity seem to be pretending it isn’t even happening. That race is taking place in Kentucky, and if you haven’t been paying attention to it, you’ve been missing what could be the fight for the very soul of the Republican Party.
Early last year, Kentucky’s Senator Jim Bunning, who won re-election in 2004 with a slim majority of only 50.7%, announced that he would seek re-election in 2010. However, after several months of frustratingly slow fundraising, Bunning announced on July 27th that he would in fact retire. In his announcement, he strongly hinted that NRSC Chairman John Cornyn (who had been pressuring Bunning to retire) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (the senior senator from Kentucky) had worked behind the scenes to dry up his fundraising sources.
After Bunning announced his intention to retire, five candidates filed to pursue the Republican nomination; of those, Trey Grayson, Kentucky’s Secretary of State, was widely considered the favorite, having an established record and being considered the unofficial apprentice of Sen. McConnell. Indeed, during the summer of 2009, McConnell, despite not having issued any formal endorsement, held fundraisers for Grayson in Washington.
However, quite unexpectedly, Rand Paul, a Bowling Green ophthalmologist who has never held public office, also filed and began a grassroots-fueled campaign that took off like a shot. Funded by online “money bombs” inspired by his father Ron Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign, the Paul campaign has kept pace with Grayson’s, despite drawing primarily from small donors. While over 17% of Grayson’s funds have come from PACs, over 99% of Paul’s donations come from individual donors. The first primary poll, taken August 15-17, 2009, showed Grayson leading Paul by 11 points…however, by Halloween, Paul had pulled ahead, and has led Grayson by double digits since Christmas.
Over the past two weeks, this race has revealed a group within the GOP leadership that is particularly desperate to keep Paul out of the Senate. After securing the endorsements of a large contingent of the GOP caucus in Kentucky’s state legislature, Grayson was also endorsed by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Vice President Dick Cheney. Paul landed some big endorsements himself, particularly former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, former presidential candidate Steve Forbes, and the man he’s running to replace, Jim Bunning. This last one was seen as especially significant, since Bunning is a family friend of Grayson and had originally encouraged him to run. But things really got interesting when Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, endorsed Trey Grayson, citing his commitment to pro-life policies, on April 29th. However, the following Monday, May 3rd, Dobson suddenly retracted his endorsement of Grayson, and instead endorsed Paul. In a radio ad he cut for the Paul campaign, Dobson called his endorsement of Grayson an, “embarrassing mistake,” saying he had been “misled by senior GOP leaders” into believing that Paul was pro-choice, but had found out otherwise after talking to Paul personally as well as “OB/GYNs in Kentucky whom I know and trust.”
This revelation, as well as a PPP poll released May 4th showing Paul 18 points ahead, led McConnell to publicly endorse Grayson. The very next day, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint publicly endorsed Paul, despite only two weeks before having publicly said that he didn’t want to get involved in the race because, “…I don’t want to poke my finger in the leader’s eye….but I’m not going to let the race get unfair.” Apparently, DeMint decided that McConnell’s endorsement and possible deception of Dr. Dobson (who Kentucky GOP sources have anonymously identified as the culprit in Dobson’s initial Grayson endorsement) qualified as “unfair.” DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund has committed to raising $50,000 for Paul’s campaign.
So now we have a Senate primary with Trey Grayson flanked by prominent neoconservatives Giuliani and Cheney, plus the current Senate Minority Leader on one side with Rand Paul backed by Tea Party darling Sarah Palin along with fiscal conservative Steve Forbes, Senate Conservative Fund founder Jim DeMint, Senator Jim Bunning, and prominent social conservative Dr. James Dobson on the other. What’s significant about this to me is this: neoconservatives have controlled the Republican Party for most of the last 20 years, with a large part of their support coming from Christian conservatives. Christian conservatives point to issues like abortion, gay marriage, and support for Israel as their criteria for picking candidates. The Tea Party movement seems to be changing that dynamic, though. Now, for possibly the first time, a candidate who identifies primarily with fiscal issues and a more non-interventionist foreign policy has secured millions in funding from small donors, as well as prominent endorsements, including one of the national leaders of social conservatism. Why?
Because Christian conservatives don’t like being lied to, just like everyone else.
I believe a Rand Paul victory would be truly significant, because it would indicate that a fundamental shift is underway in the GOP. Not just a simple shift to the right, like so many newspapers are saying, but a shift away from carte-blanche support of neoconservatives by social conservatives, and a shift towards a focus on fiscal issues, with terrorism and reshaping the Middle East receding in importance. This would mean that Republicans are becoming more and more aware of the dire need to get our fiscal house in order, and a willingness to accept that that means cuts not only in social programs, but in military expenditures as well. Such a notion flies in the face of neoconservatism, which as Dick Cheney said in 2004, holds that, “…deficits don’t matter.”
If the Tea Party movement is to have a lasting impact, a large part of its goal must be the reshaping of the Republican Party into something resembling a party that stands for constitutional government, sound money, individual liberty, and a sane foreign policy. That requires more than purging squishy moderates from the party. It also requires repudiating the neoconservative assumption that big government under Republicans is somehow superior to big government under Democrats. The outcome of the Kentucky GOP Senate primary on May 18th will go a long way toward deciding whether that will occur.
The latest twist in this saga has been a $100,000 buy last week by a group calling itself the American Future Fund to run attack ads against Paul. The AFF is a 501(c)4 whose leadership includes people connected to both Grayson and McConnell. It also includes two media consultants who played key roles in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad campaign that sank John Kerry in 2004 and the Willie Horton ad that doomed Michael Dukakis’ campaign in 1988. In response, Paul’s online donations have seen a spike of tens of thousands of dollars in just a couple of days.
Can Paul and his new fiscal/social conservative coalition stave off the neoconservatives’ Sunday punch? May 18th is just around the corner. Stay tuned…
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©2010 aclove. Special to PunditHouse. Used by permission.
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