Forget the results for a second. What I want to concentrate on is the slant of the reporting, in this case from Lee Davidson of the Salt Lake Tribune. To wit:
The tea party, big-spending PACs and challenger Dan Liljenquist failed Tuesday to force 78-year-old Orrin Hatch into retirement. The self-proclaimed “tough old bird” flew easily through the GOP primary, so now only Democrat Scott Howell stands between him and a record-shattering seventh term.
“I’m very energized by all this,” Hatch said as it became clear he would likely win by a wide margin. “This will give us an opportunity to help Mitt Romney to get the things that will really turn this country around.”
[…]
Hatch’s easy win shows how much Utah’s political landscape changed since two years ago, when the tea party managed to dump three-term incumbent Sen. Bob Bennett at the state GOP convention.
Hatch avoided Bennett’s fate first by spending heavily to recruit supporters to attend political caucuses to run as state GOP delegates — and replace many of the tea partyers that doomed Bennett. It helped him to survive the convention to face a primary.
“I think what also helped us was Mitt Romney’s endorsement,” said Dave Hansen, Hatch’s campaign manager. “It wasn’t just Mitt saying, ‘I endorse Orrin.’ He was saying, ‘As president, I need Orrin Hatch in the Senate to help me.’ That made a difference” with Romney-loving Utahns.
[…]
Hatch’s heavy spending outpaced more than $1 million spent by the national FreedomWorks PAC, which had helped to defeat Bennett. (FreedomWorks spent even more than the $800,000 or so that Liljenquist’s campaign itself spent).
Groups supporting Hatch also spent heavily to help him. Such PACs, including FreedomPath and the National Rifle Association, spent $969,000 to help him.
First, let me say this: Liljenquist, with his talk of “revenue enhancements” and his prior political record, didn’t strike me — or a number of other conservatives / classical liberals — as a particularly spectacular candidate (unlike, say, a Ted Cruz in Texas). Second, Hatch had the support not only of the Romney camp, but also of people like Mark Levin and Sean Hannity, who were openly advocating for him. And finally — and this is key — a number of TEA Party groups supported Hatch, including the TEA Party Express.
So while FreedomWorks supported Liljenquist, it simply isn’t true that the TEA Party was defeated here — and I suspect the reporter know this.
Which raises the question: why is this story written in such a way that it suggests more of a TEA Party defeat than a Hatch victory?
And the answer, of course, is that the media — even if it is putatively “conservative” — is largely invested in beating back TEA Party influence.
But as I’ve said before, the TEA Party isn’t a party. It’s an attitude toward government and toward personal responsibility and individual sovereignty. And what this election shows me is that even though a well-funded TEA Party organization like FreedomWorks threw its weight behind Liljenquist, the people of Utah were more interested in the candidates and their policy positions than any label that was put on them.
Just because you slap “TEA Party candidate” in front of your name doesn’t guarantee you the support of those who support the ideas and attitudes of the TEA Party. In Utah, the more conservative of the two candidates won. And because of that, the TEA Party movement won.
That Lee Davidson and the GOP — along with nearly every major media outlet — would like to pretend otherwise is of little consequence. Despite what they believe is their power over the narrative.
7 terms and after each our failshit little country slides further down the shithole
good work Mr. Hatch
Hatch is a moron who sponsors new entitlement legislation to honor the memory of Ted Kennedy and who has his very own shuttered Solyndra (geothermal this time) here in Utah.
That said, putting him back in the Senate isn’t the worst thing to happen to the Republic.
I’da voted against him yesterday but I was booked solid during voting hours.
I could have added that happyfeet was against Hatch as further proof that the TEA Party ideals didn’t lose. But why elevate him?
It does seem as though — supposing Davidson’s position is as suggested, a position seeking to diminish the strength of the philosophical stance of Tea Party adherents of whatever stripe by means of falsely circumscribing the limits of the Tea Party blanket — that very concern with Tea Party power or strength, a concern which motivates the effort to mischaracterize the current state of the movement, gives away the kernel of the game he plays, hiding his fearful understanding of the wider implications of the Tea Party groundswell.
Here’s the thing: the TEA Party movement is not anti-incumbent just to be anti-incumbent. FreedomWorks may have gotten a bit drunk on their own influence.
Hatch fought hard for Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork. The guy has been pushing balanced budget amendments for years. And he certainly seems to have recognized and embraced the Tea Party ethos of late.
Whether he maintains it now, we shall see. But when your opponent is talking about revenue enhancers, he isn’t what he’s selling himself as.
Hatch is collegial to a fault. But he’s going to be a senior member on the finance committee if he’s re-elected and Romney wins. If someone demonstrably better than him was put up — someone who is a rock-ribbed constitutionalist — he may have lost. As it stands, this was an ego stroke campaign — an anti-incumbent campaign — and many saw it for just what it was.
I’m not a huge Hatch supporter, as everyone here knows, because I hate the forced collegiality; but it is the traditional method of the Senate, and it that sense Hatch is merely being conservative.
And Hatch has been a constant and stalwart conservative with respect to judicial fights and balancing the budget. Those are important — no, crucial — things.
I’ve been left with a sense (undocumented, is why only sense) that Hatch was one of the first old-dogs on the Hill to apprehend the wider meaning of the Tea Party, very early in the existence of the phenomenon. Why is that, when so many other political men in Congress have yet to grasp the nut? I assumed at the time it was simply a matter of a harmonious ring: something in Hatch reverberated to the thing, so he found it easy to recognize.
his goal, like Meghan’s hyper-entitled coward daddy’s, is nothing less than to die in office I think
cause of it is his office
Hatch went to great effort to cultivate Utah TP groups after Bennett’s ouster in 2010. Now that he feels he’s survived the threat to his re-election, I expect those groups to have a harder time getting him to return their calls. By November 7 he’ll have changed his number and had all the locks replaced.
Here’s the thing…will this pull hatch right a little? Is being primaried (successfully or unsucessfully) good for the Tea Party message and the Republican future?
I was calling myself a Republican in 2008. Now I’m an anti-Democrat and marginally republican allied independent. And I’m not proud of being an independent. It’s not some badge of honor suggest that I have the brains to think outside of the box and forge my own destiny by seeing what others would miss. Screw that masturbatory bullshit. What happened is, my former party lied to me, sold me out, left me, FAILED spectacularly, got picked up and helped in 2010, and now it condemns me for recognizing what an unprincipled useless fuck up it is, and not staying loyally quiet about it. I’m furious about being an independent. I shouldn’t have to be. They told me it was a party for conservatives and it just isn’t.
JG’s point above is well taken. One could only hope the yellow caricature would similarly just die in his office. Sooner rather than later. It would likely induce more commentary.
This is quite possible. McCain did the same. We’ll see.
But Levin and Hannity combined have a big microphone, and Levin in particular is not shy about calling people out.
I’m furious about being an independent. I shouldn’t have to be.
I like this. I may borrow it.
Oh yeah I’m also grateful that Marvel comics had fake replacement Captain America ( who fought as a boy in WW2 and went on to become a brainwashed Russian agent) stand up to the Tea Party’s murderous KKK hillbilly racist terrorism, their 70’s Hank Williams Jr. villain beards, and their 70’s raybans evil ( a white southern racist mob as it might have been portrayed in an early Simon and Simon episode).
There was no real cultural effect beyond a sneering news story about it and a mumbled non-apology. That’s because since 2002 or so, Superhero comics are mostly read by about 250,000 aging, jaded men. And apparently those men want super-hero comics to become more and more R rated until they resemble the movies ‘Seven’ or ‘Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’ only with some superheroes involved somehow (maybe as victims). It’s a jaded crowd who resents politics and the news in general. They just want to see bad (usually sexual) things happen to Ms. Marvel or Spider-Woman and see super heroes they’ve only barely heard of get shot in the head because that is shocking. Pandering to this thankfully shrinking audience for a living must be a whole lot of fun if you hate them (and superheroes) and horrible if you want to like them.
The Comics crowd mocking the Tea Party is pretty damned fuckin’ funny.
I’m also grateful that ol’ Sorkin is back with “the Newsroom” where once again the right is hobbled with easy mode so the left can bop them like one of those inflatable bowling pin shaped “stand back up” clowns that children like to box with. I only hope that Bob Beckel, Alan Colmes, and Juan Williams are inspired to mine it for zingers only to stare in fish eyed shock when the zingers aren’t in good outside of Sorkin’s “fixed fight” context.
I love it when the left tries to own and shape a whole pop culture for people that have already grown disgusted with them.
I think there is a slow but steady cultural sea change happening right now, and has been since 2009. The left don’t like it. And the people of this country don’t much care if the left likes it. So the left is freaking out. They don’t freak out so much when they feel safe.
So stuff like the above tells me that they don’t feel safe.
I’d vote for Howell in November, were I a Utah resident.
What drives the establishment crazy is that the Tea Party is in fact, as Jeff notes, not a party at all but a broad philosophical position about Leviathan. As such, it is hard to fight. So, go Alinsky. Personalize it,freeze it, polarize it. Pretend it is something it is not and make it the villain. Distill the Tea Party attitude into a racist hayseed caricature and mock it. And this is often what REPUBLICANS do.
The tea party, like occupy whatever it is we feel like occupying today is a child’s “you’re not the boss of me!” tantrum. A fit pitched by an unruly mob too stupid to know how to follow the leadership with which this nation has been providentially graced.
David Brooks (by way of Rush Limbaugh) told me so.
heh
“. . . an unruly mob too stupid to know how to follow the leadership . . . ”
Which is precisely why some among us in the US so love Democracy! Geniuses!
The company we keep. (Forward to 1:12)
True. Including most of the big “conservative” sites on the web, be they online versions of magazines or popular rightwing blogs.
But the thing is? Tea Party candidates continue to upset party-sponsored candidates. And the GOP hasn’t been able to stop it — so it’s reduced to helping the MSM with the continuing narrative about the demise of the movement.
And the reason for the failure of the naysayers, I believe, is that — as I spoke about back when I outlined “outlaw!” — lots of Democrats of the old-type, the “Reagan Democrats,” who despise leftism and who don’t much like Rockefeller crony Republicanism and squishy status-quo ruling class politics, are joining the racist purist hayseed Hobbits in an effort to beat back this expansion of government that they rightly see as bipartisan.
This will probably be Hatch’s last term, maybe he’s just the man to lead an all out attack on the leviathan. If events align, maybe we’ll even get a BBA.
I know Alinsky is a favorite hobby horse of a lot of us ‘winger types, in particular this quote “Personalize it,freeze it, polarize it. Pretend it is something it is not and make it the villain” often used by Glenn Beck and Rush. I’m tired of hearing about fucking Saul Alinsky. I’ve been reading about this guy since Bill and Hill were our president. Frankly, he says nothing differrent or more profound than any of the other millions of commie agitators since Emma Goldstein have said. He’s only less remote in time and thus often quoted.
I concede Alinsky’s utility as a touchstone as his name only be invoked and it galvanizes many folks as if it were one of the names for Satan. Since I spend a lot of my time trying to correct the thinking of people who suffer from magical thinking, blaming and deflecting—you know, teenagers—it is very frustrating that so much of our voting populace suffer from the same delusions and have them reinforced by the alphabet networks, television programming (Republicans bad! Tea Party worse!), hell even cartoons. It is even more frustrating that there is a tendency by some (not here, of course) to put the face of Saul Alinsky, like a mask of Guy Fawkes, on any democrat or libertarian-leaning position and then cross their arms and spit “’nuff said!”
It’s Emma Goldman.
That’s right. Thank you.
Welcome.
Goldbud.
Insty’s linking you!
Oh suuuuuure, the tea party lost here. I guess they missed it when Sarah Palin endorsed him. Is there anyone more of a hero to the tea party than Palin? She may not be the nationwide leader…but she is the closest thing to it you will find.
I wonder if anyone has put together a total won/lost record for her endorsements since 2008.
I’m tired of hearing about Marx. That doesn’t mean his influence doesn’t continue to need to be squashed like a diseased mosquito.
I’m tired of hearing about fucking Saul Alinsky.
get use to it. this struggle was years in the making. ain’t gonna be corrected overnite.
Read the rest of my post wherein I explain what I mean, nr.
And I’ll roger that about Marx, Pablo.
I’m tired of hearing about “the fiscal cliff” while Mr. Hatch’s congress passes gay-assed student loan subsidies
I’m tired of trenchfoot.
I’m tired of carly rae and I’m tired of mad men and I’m tired of reading about europe at zerohedge
zzz…
zzz…
zzz…
I think the comic books have had things wrong with them for a while longer than that.
For instance: just look at this awful stuff.
That’s one of the most highly-paid artists in the business, right there. It’s what people want: guns that make no sense, bodies that are anatomically impossible, clothing that, well, looks like this, and really, horribly awful writing. And we’re not even scratching the surface of discussing his female characters.
Those links are worth a look, if only because they’re written by guys who say things like this:
Only if the well has been sealed as for nuclear waste.