The GOP Civil War is Over... and the Tea Party Won?

theweek.com/article/index/261149/speedreads-the-gop-civil-war-is-over-and-the-tea-party-won

And so, the tea party message gets co-opted by the establishment - which, for tea party conservatives, ought to be cause for celebration; incumbents who want to survive either get religion, or get ousted.

The Tea Party is More Unpopular than Ever

theweek.com/article/index/261263/speedreads-the-tea-party-is-less-popular-than-ever

They challenge the neocons and there is nothing wrong with that..

Well they are somewhat a joke, actually thinking a tiger will change it's stripes. Imagine that.

But then they do serve a huge function, making sure that just no matter how obstinate the blue team gets, the red team doesn't cause a huge imbalance. After all, divide and conquer is the name of the game.

And Now the Tea Party Has Its Own Civil War

news.yahoo.com/now-tea-party-own-civil-war-145513379.html

On Tuesday, Nebraska Republican voters will choose between former State Treasurer Shane Osborn and Midland University president Ben Sasse in the Senate primary.

Instead of a battle between the establishment and the Tea Party, this primary has become an intra-Tea-Party war.

Both candidates have been endorsed at different times by Freedomworks. The influential libertarian fundraising group first picked Osborn as its guy, but later switched and endorsed Sasse.

Local Tea Party activists are mad.

In a Monty Python joke come to life, Nebraska Tea Partiers are accusing Freedomworks of being too Washington. Fifty-two local activists posted an open letter to Freedomworks, complaining,

We are not million-dollar Washington, D.C., special interest groups with strong ties to Capitol Hill. We are simply Nebraskans who are fed up. We were not consulted, polled, or contacted by these Washington, D.C., groups.

First they railed against Obama, then the Republican establishment, and now the Republican fringe group. The only people we hate more than the Romans are the Judean People's Front!

Jonathan Weisman and Jennifer Steinhauer at The New York Times see these tensions as "an inevitable product of a political movement that began without central leadership and spread with antigovernment fervor."

Local activists now resent the fact that Freedomworks and other groups like Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund have started to dictate who the Tea Party candidates will be.

These groups have also been called hypocritical for splurging on fancy hotels and high-priced entertainment. (Club for Growth has raised $5.2 million this year and spent only $536,000 on operations. SCF has a Capitol Hill townhouse with a hot tub and wine cellar.)

Now, Nebraskan Tea Partiers have aligned themselves with House Speaker John Boehner and the establishment, whether they'd like to admit that or not. Boehner has railed against these groups for picking bad candidates and mishandling money. He wants to demolish them in the midterms.

Patrick Bonnett, the chairman of the Conservative Coalition of Nebraska, says Freedomworks just needs to start communicating with local activists again.

"It worked well when they communicated with us on the ground," he tells the Times. "It breaks down when they unilaterally get involved in our local races, even if it’s in federal campaigns, and endorse and start spending money."

What Last Night's Tea Party 'Wins' Mean for the GOP

news.yahoo.com/last-nights-tea-party-wins-mean-gop-140633099.html

Were last night's primaries a "win" for the Tea Party?

Accepting, for a moment, the prevailing narrative winds of an establishment v. Tea Party fight for the soul of the Republican Party in this year's midterm elections, then the Nebraska and West Virginia results are, basically, close enough.

Tea Party groups and conservatives endorsed Ben Sasse in the Nebraska Senate primaries, spending over $2 million campaigning for him leading up to last night's vote, which he easily won.

Since Nebraska is deep red, the winner of last night's primaries has a very good chance of taking the general election in November.

Even though Sasse is hardly the normal model of a Tea Party candidate — a university president, Sasse also holds "visiting scholar" status at the Brookings Institute — his campaign platform was cut from the conservative movement's cloth. He got a glowing review from the National Review early in his campaign, particularly for his opposition to the Affordable Care Act:

With Sasse...

Nebraska Republicans have an opportunity to do more:

They can elect not merely a man who promises to vote for the repeal of President Obama’s signature policy achievement, but a senator who almost immediately would become one of the GOP’s most visible and articulate experts on the health-care law’s defects and the ways to replace it.

As, it turns out, Sasse's policies are very similar to those of his main rival, Shane Osborn.

Osborn was initially endorsed by Freedomworks, but then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also endorsed Osborn.

The national Tea Party groups, who all pretty much can't stand McConnell, switched teams and backed Sasse.

Many other national Tea Party figures and groups followed suit.

That move drew some anger from Nebraska-based Tea Party groups, who saw Sasse as a "mainstream" kind of Tea Party-type guy — someone who might end up too Washington — and not the candidate they favored.

Anyway, Osborn actually ended up coming in third last night.

Sid Disndale, a candidate that both Sasse and Osborn dismissed as too "moderate," came in second. Along with Sasse, there was another check mark on the Tea Party's victory board this week.

West Virginia, the Tea-Party endorsed Alex Mooney won the nomination for the state's Second Congressional district.

Even though the situation on the ground, especially in Nebraska, was clearly more complicated than a fight between establishment and Tea Party, the primary could demonstrate that the Tea Party wing of the national party — the current establishment's rivals to become the establishment — can also mobilize around successful candidates.

Ed Kilgore at Talking Points Memo used the results to push back hard against the narrative that the establishment will win the day in 2014 and take back the GOP from its new class of Tea Party "insurgents."

But in some ways, that prevailing battle narrative has already played out.

Because despite common perception that the Tea Party vs. Establishment fight is about just how conservative the GOP really is, even this year's establishment "wins" demonstrate that candidates running to the right do well.

North Carolina's big establishment victory elevated Thom Tillis, the State Speaker of the House who led the charge of a Republican-majority's successful marathon of new, far-right, laws in the state. It's hard to find a difference between what Tillis supports and what the Tea Party wants.

The difference is that Tillis is, presumably, a more polished politician. He's not going to talk about God willing rape pregnancies to happen or something like that and torpedo one of the GOP's best shots to get a vulnerable Democratic senator out of office.

He has, however, said that the GOP should "divide and conquer" America's poor people, so that people who actually need government assistance "look down at these people who choose to get into a condition that makes them dependent on the government."

And he helped to guide a bill that combined motorcycle and abortion regulations through the House.

In other words, nothing and everything changes.

The "establishment's" Tea Party trouble existed before the Tea Party even existed, because the national Tea Party is itself just the newest iteration of a particular alignment of influential conservatives within the party, who attract the same group of conservative voters to the polls.

Time marches forever onward.