Not surprisingly, Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, sees it quite differently: Commenting for The American Spectator, Kibbe explains, “When the establishment runs on our issues to win political battles, we are winning the war. There is larger cultural shift happening here. Americans are sick of an arrogant and unchecked federal government. Because of grassroots challenges in the primaries, incumbents like Mitch McConnell had to go on the record and renew their commitment to constitutionally limited government. We have stronger Republican candidates in the general as a result. ”Kibbe is right, which explains why Democratic political operatives have such a different message compared to the missing-the-forest-for-the-trees reporters and semi-expert pundits. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie “Stop me before Iselfie again” Wasserman Schultz argued on MSNBC that “The civil war that’s been raging in the Republican Party is really over. The tea party has won it.” She repeated the theme at a Wednesday morning press event.Radical socialist, 9/11 “truther” and former Obama “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones says, “It looks like the Tea Party might lose some of these battles, but they’ve already won the war.” He went on to parrot the Democratic talking point that “establishment Republicans now have been pulled so far to the right.” (Aren’t you just dying to know what the rest would have been, had he understood that that wasn’t a complete sentence?)Kibbe and leftists agree: The Tea Party is influencing the GOP, causing Republican politicians to adhere more closely to conservative, pro-liberty, and free-market principles. The difference is that Kibbe thinks this impact is beneficial on both a political and a policy basis, while Democrats work to create a bogeyman of “extreme” Republicans — a caricature which has been effective in recent elections when terrible candidates like Todd Akin all but proved the point and Mitt Romney seemed incapable of relating to the ordinary American.
Townhall columnist Mark Davis holds this view, even as he understands the determination to the bitter end of some to find alternatives to "establishment" figures:
While some conservative voters are willing to take a leap of faith with familiar names who profess enlightenment, the Tea Party purists remain skeptical, and they are not to be blamed. The Kentuckians who voted for Bevin had simply had it up to their eyeballs with a status quo featuring Republicans unwilling to stand up to Obama-era expansionism. They consider fresh faces the only option, and that is not unreasonable.
But the lesson is: not every Tea Party candidate brings the brilliance, skill and message discipline of Ted Cruz. Please remember that America’s strongest Tea Party icon did not take out an entrenched incumbent to reach the Senate. He captured an open seat, and thus the hearts of conservatives tired of decades of Republican meekness. If the Tea Party phenomenon is at such an ebb, why is its biggest star the most powerful force in Washington?
When Tea Party candidates lose, sometimes it’s due to flaws other than ideology. Some are not the crispest campaigners. Some do not have the sharpest staffs. Sometimes they say wacky things and hang themselves.
None of those events constitute a narrative of a Tea Party in decline.
It's inevitable that the Tea Party as a movement will morph into something else. It's just a current iteration of basic conservatism, primarily an expression of conservative principles by people who only recently realized they embraced them.
It's been effective. As Davis says, "its success is confirmed by the extent of its thorough infiltration of the party."
The big caveat in all of this: If there's a major cave on amnesty for illegal aliens, all bets are off.
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