I’ll describe the scenario, you guess the race: a well-funded incumbent faces a primary challenge that strikes a chord with the party base. The party establishment rallies to the incumbent lawmaker’s aid, while the upstart challenger gets support from partisan activists and a nationally-known organization, which commits extensive resources to the campaign. In the end, the base beat the establishment and the challenger won the primary by a single digits.
The race, of course, was the GOP primary in Michigan’s 7th congressional district, in which evangelical minister Tim Walberg defeated incumbent Rep. Joe Schwarz, thanks in large part to the assistance from the Club for Growth. As TNR’s Michael Crowley explained in a very interesting piece, “The political world may be riveted by liberal ideologues trying to oust Joe Lieberman. But it’s conservative ideologues, led by the Club for Growth, who may wind up delivering the U.S. Senate into Democratic hands.”
Since its inception, the Club for Growth has been a stone in the shoe of Washington Republicans. Party leaders may share the Club’s core ideology of maximum tax cuts and spending reductions, but they also recognize the reality of the electorate — namely that Republicans from moderate states and districts shouldn’t commit political suicide in the name of ideology. So, when the Club began mounting primary challenges against Northeastern moderates like Sherwood Boehlert and Marge Roukema, it did so in opposition to congressional GOP leaders. (“We can’t have this infighting between conservatives and moderates and maintain our majority,” Tom DeLay grumbled to The Washington Post in 2000.)
When the Club ran TV ads attacking moderate Republican senators who had been opposing a 2003 Bush tax cut, Karl Rove pronounced the move “stupid.” And many Republicans were furious in 2004 when the Club spent $2.3 million in a bid to end Arlen Specter’s 24-year Senate career. Its chosen candidate, right-wing Pennsylvania Representative Pat Toomey — who ripped Specter as a “dangerous liberal” — came within two points of succeeding, even though few Republicans believed Toomey could survive a general election.
Of course, this year, the Club for Growth is actually starting to make a difference. It’s not just in Michigan’s 7th.
Most notably, the Club is investing nearly $1 million in backing Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey against Sen. Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island’s Republican Senate primary. Confronted with the charge that Laffey can’t win a general election campaign in a solidly “blue” state, and that the Club for Growth should get with the GOP program, the group says replacing Chafee, the most liberal Republican in Congress, with a real Dem “wouldn’t be much of a loss … as he would vote much the same.”
Then there’s the race in Idaho’s 1st.
[B]oth parties are watching Idaho’s First District, where the Club has spent more than $300,000 on behalf of State Representative Bill Sali. A Christian fundamentalist and home-schooler, Sali is widely known, even among Republicans, as an insufferable jerk. “A bully,” according to one of his fellow conservative legislators. “Just an absolute idiot,” the GOP state House speaker recently said. Mike Simpson, the sitting representative from the state’s other congressional district, even threatened during one heated argument to throw Sali out a window.
When Vice President Dick Cheney visited for a Sali fund-raiser, the scene was a like a birthday party for the class pariah; only three of Sali’s 104 legislative colleagues showed. A group of anti-Sali Republican businessmen have gone so far as to endorse the Democrat in the race, apparently on the theory that it’s better to sacrifice the seat to Democrats for two years than be stuck with a Republican they despise. Ordinarily, Democrats would consider an Idaho seat utterly hopeless. But, one party operative says, they’re keeping an eye on the race, “only because [Sali]’s in it.”
Here’s my question: why do we hear non-stop talk about MoveOn.org and Connecticut when a conservative special interest group is running around the country with impunity trying to a) purge the GOP of nearly every moderate they can find; and b) elect far-right ideologues? If I had a nickel for every news item about how crazy lefties have been mean to Joe Lieberman and are trying to hijack the Democratic Party, it’d be like winning the lottery. But on the other side of the aisle, it’s practical silence.
Note to editors everywhere: there’s a real purge of moderates underway, but you’re looking at the wrong party.