Not to reiterate my previous reiteration, but I will note that I was perhaps the first out of the box to predict the narrative forming around some of yesterday’s races:  a Cuccinelli loss and a big Christie win was to be framed as the need for moderate, bipartisan, compromising candidates willing to help rebuild the GOP brand (by, for instance, coming out for in-state tuition perks for criminals in the country illegally, a base pander that is sold to us as “outreach” to the “Hispanic community”); it was to signal the failure of the TEA Party and the promise of “pro-business” center-rightism.  In short, it was concocted — very intentionally and using all the methods at the GOP establishment’s disposal — to create the perception of inevitability for Christie-like candidates on the national scene, while noting the futility of trying to win elections on ideas, a strategy that marks one as a “purist”.  The mantra, supposedly sober and realistic, has become this:  we need to win elections, not arguments.  Which is all well and good until you realize that the strategy to win elections is to become slower-moving big government statists and collusive insiders who enjoy the paradigm of liberal fascism in which big business and big government work together to control the flow of money and contracts, regulations, and artificial interest rates and QE infinity, all of which helps keep the mirage of the stock market alive.

The Virginia race — the GOP boosters’ rather dismissive sneers to the contrary — was in essence fixed, if not directly that with careful and deliberate sabotage.  The GOP spent $3 million dollars on Cuccinelli’s race, they claimed, even though as Mark Levin pointed out in a call to WMAL to “correct” Reince Priebus, much of that money went toward the “autopsy” that itself set out to declare that elections were being lost (by Mourdock, for instance) because the candidates the people were putting up weren’t those preferred by the GOP king makers and deal makers.   Contrast this to the $9 million they spent on Bob McConnell — who won by 17 pts, and who didn’t have the entire force of the left in Virginia to try to defeat him — and you can see exactly what the GOP establishment was up to here.

Now, I realize many of you don’t want to hear this.  But it’s the case nevertheless.  The GOP spend time and money in NJ where they knew Christie was a lock.  The object?  To try to get his win numbers at historical highs.   Meanwhile, Republican state officials, former and active, in Virginia either refused to endorse Cuccinelli, or else actively endorse McCauliffe.  And like Colin Powell, calling yourself a Republican while you’re endorsing a leftist former DNC Chair who actively spoke to taking up tax hikes and trying to implement Obama’s gun control agenda, means you’re doing the whole Republican thing wrong.

Or perhaps not.  Perhaps you’re just one of the honest establishment Republicans.  And that you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to do.  Because your political philosophy is far more attuned to the big government statism of the increasingly Marxist left than it is toward the principles of our founding — represented in the self-identification of over 40% of population who call themselves conservative or very conservative.

But back to the main point:   the narrative I described has been in the works, and the outcomes of the two states — said to have national implications — has been carefully prepared.   Which is why no one can be surprised by this op-ed in today’s WSJ:

The major political parties split Tuesday’s pair of Governor’s races, as Democrat Terry McAuliffe won a close race for an open seat in the swing state of Virginia while Republican Chris Christie romped to a second term in New Jersey. The party that should do the most soul-searching is the GOP.

Start with the embarrassing fact that Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli lost to Mr. McAuliffe, a carpetbagger and crony capitalist from central casting. The chief fundraiser for Team Clinton was the first Virginia gubernatorial candidate of a sitting President’s party to win since 1977. The defeat has many fathers, including incumbent Republican Bob McDonnell, who can only serve one term and got himself into a political-gift scandal that made it hard for the GOP to run an ethics campaign against Mr. McAuliffe.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s supposed friends in the tea party also stabbed him in the back by pushing the government shutdown. About 30% of Virginia voters live in the Washington, D.C., suburbs that are packed with government employees, and the Democrat won that suburban vote by 62% to 33% according to the exit polls. If Senator Ted Cruz, Heritage Action and the kamikaze caucus had spent money for Mr. Cuccinelli instead of attacking fellow Republicans in August, he might have won.

The bigger question for 2014 and beyond is whether Virginia is moving from swing state to majority Democratic. This seems unlikely only four years after Mr. McDonnell won 59% of the vote. Mr. Cuccinelli also spent the last week campaigning against ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion in Virginia, and it helped him close what was a double-digit deficit.

But Mr. Cuccinelli’s dour social conservatism hurt him among some voters. His positions on abortion and gay marriage are the same as Mr. McDonnell’s and for that matter not much different from Mr. Christie’s. Yet Mr. Cuccinelli sometimes gives the impression of being a charter member of the cast-the-first-stone coalition, which made it easier for Democrats to stereotype him with their deluge of TV ads financed by the Clinton machine.

Mr. Cuccinelli never found a strategy or language to neutralize the Democratic “war on women” or war on immigrants charges, which is a warning to Republicans in all but the most conservative states. His hardline immigration position repeated Mitt Romney‘s blunder in a state that has a growing Hispanic population. Mr. Cuccinelli won the white vote by 20 percentage points, but the electorate was only 70% white compared to 78% four years ago. He won by four points among men but lost women by eight.

The other big question from Tuesday is what Republicans can learn from Mr. Christie’s resounding triumph. Part of the victory is personal, a tribute to his outsized personality and talent for blunt persuasion. His embrace of President Obama after Hurricane Sandy a year ago irritated many Republicans and hurt Mr. Romney, but it sealed Mr. Christie’s reputation as a leader for New Jersey.

One mistake for the GOP to avoid is casting Mr. Christie as a “moderate” because he won twice in a Democratic state. The Governor has by and large governed as a conservative reformer. He vetoed a tax increase on millionaires and capped property taxes. He pushed tenure reforms that will make it easier to fire bad teachers, and he extracted far more pension reform out of a Democratic legislature than did Democratic Governors Jerry Brown in California or Andrew Cuomo in New York.

It’s all of it there, every last carefully-planned bit of propaganda:  Christie is not a moderate, he’s a conservative (which is true, I guess, so long as conservatism is framed and defined by moderates, as Karl Rove has been working to do).  He vetoed a tax increase, and yet he called for in-state tuition for illegals, the money for which has to come from somewhere.  He pushed tenure reforms, and yet he backs the entire bogus science — and attendant taxation — of AGW.  He refused to sign the brief against ObamaCare brought by Cuccinnelli and a number of other state Governors, and was among the first to embrace and implement the state exchange.

By contrast, we are told it was the evil Ted Cruz and his opportunistic PURISTS sabatoged Cuccinelli, not the GOP establishment, who are now calling themselves the real “conservatives” while painting representative leaders and constitutionalists as “fringe” and “extreme” and “far right” — precisely the way Democrats describe the same kinds of candidates, and for precisely the same reasons.   And Cruz sabotaged Cuccinelli, we’re told,  by “shutting down the government” — a claim that is demonstrably false, given that it was Reid and Obama who shut down the government to avoid a delay in rolling out the President’s “signature health care reform law” that experience has now shown us was a complete and utter disaster.  One that Cuccinelli fought in federal court to defeat, and one that Cruz, Lee, et al., tried to warn us would lead to the kind of misery, chaos, and lost policies we’re seeing now — with more to come once Obama’s unconstitutional waivers, which in effect are a rewriting of the law on the fly to reward cronies and to hide more dislocation, barely in time for the next set of 2014 elections.

Rather than “stabbing Cuccinelli in the back,” Cruz and Lee gave him a strong position to run on.   It was instead the GOP establishment, who pushed the “default” meme and were actively out undermining the Cruz / Lee effort to keep the American people safe from what they are now learning is a kind of Kafkaesque nightmare, who stabbed conservatives in the back, then went out of their way to manufacture a defeat, either by withholding money, refusing to endorse a very successful state AG, actively endorsing and empty-suited sleazeball and DNC fundraiser like McCauliffe, and then doing nothing to highlight that the “Libertarian” third party candidate, who got 6% of the vote in an election decided by 2 points, was actually funded by a Democrat bundler.  They let Cuccinelli die on the vine, and then pointed to their various superficial efforts as proof of their engagement and support.

The fact is, protestations to the contrary that such an assertion is “asinine,” the GOP establishment wanted these dual outcomes.   And we will now be fed the very same “inevitability arguments” that gave us Romney in 2012.

Only this time, it won’t work.  Because I can see, for maybe the first time since Perot, many conservatives simply refusing to back the GOP’s hand-picked professional pol.  And that’s not to say that doing so will even be a punishment for the Beltway GOP insiders:  I believe they’ll be able to work with Hillary without too much difficulty, or even if not, they’ll still have their beaks whet and they’ll then try to fundraise off the need to rid ourselves of her.  It’s also not to say that all those committed as GOP boosters are actively out undermining TEA Party candidates.  Instead, I think they believe that they are part of the “smart” set, that winning the political game takes nuance and 3-D chess playing, not merely powerful bromides about liberty, private property rights, and so on — and they simply don’t realize how badly they play that game.

Whereas the GOP establishment operatives — the Bush clan, much of FOX News, the DC insiders — are well aware of what they are doing:  what they don’t want is an uprising of the American people no longer represented by DC spoiling their insular, incestuous power party.  Comprehensive immigration reform, which the GOP is busy trying to get through with Obama and the Democrats, is intended to change the demographics and create a permanent tipping point for those dependent on government.

The question then is this:  will the small minority of liberty-minded people simply accept their fate and allow themselves to be subsumed by the Borg?  Or will they decide they’d rather live free and do what they must to ensure that happens, whether it be move to states where logistically they can resist the federal government’s pronouncements, or through some other means (state convention process, pitchforks, tar and feathers, what have you).

Time will tell I guess.