Illinois and Texas demonstrate the need for TEApublicanism

By Tim Dunkin

Previously, I have argued that conservatives both within and without the Republican Party need to band together, recapture the GOP, and use it as a vehicle for advancing our agenda. I call this strategy "TEApublicanism," since it relies primarily upon the fusion of the robust conservative activism embodied in the Tea Party movement with the organizational structure and manpower of the Republican Party and its conservative grassroots — in essence, it is part Tea Party and part Republican Party. In this strategy, conservatives would use two things — primaries and the GOP apparatus at the local/county level — to drive out RINOs and replace them with conservative Party officers and candidates for elected office.

Recent events in two states where there have been contested Republican primaries for statewide offices help to demonstrate the need for this sort of strategy. These states are Illinois and Texas. The example from Illinois shows why the GOP desperately needs the Tea Partiers to act as a corrective force, restraining the GOP "leadership" from its tendency towards compromise and centrism. Texas, on the other hand, shows us why the Tea Partiers need mainstream conservatives from the GOP to act as a corrective, holding back the fringe elements who are seeking to hijack the Tea Parties and use them as vehicles for political agendas that often are not authentically conservative.

First, Illinois. If ever there was a state whose Republican Party organization was begging to be TEApublicanized, it is Illinois. The GOP in Illinois is in a near-moribund state, and this is largely due to the maladministration perpetrated by a clique of entrenched moderate, establishment types. The establishment choice of candidate for the Illinois Senate seat that is up for election this November was former Representative Mark Kirk. Kirk is an alpha male in the RINO herd — he voted for cap'n'trade, partial birth abortion, gun control, and supports gay marriage. In a perfect world, someone like Mark Kirk wouldn't get within a million miles of a Republican nomination for dogcatcher, much less a US Senate seat. Unfortunately, the world created by the Illinois GOP leadership is anything but perfect. Years of apathy and cronyism have dispirited many Illinois Republicans from getting involved, which enabled the establishment types to get their handpicked RINO candidate into the spotlight early, presenting the picture that he had no significant opposition, that he was "inevitable."

As a matter of fact, Kirk did have a credible conservative opponent who had the backing of the Tea Parties and conservatives — Patrick Hughes. Unfortunately, Hughes got into the race relatively late, and never did seem to make the push to get his name out until right at the end, the last two weeks before the February 2 primary. There seems to have been a distinct lack of organization in the Hughes camp, and while he did make tremendous gains those last two weeks (he doubled his support from 9% to 18%, much of this simply due to the fact that people started to realize that Kirk actually had an opponent), it was too little, too late. Conservatives, Tea Partiers, grassroots activists — they just didn't get their linebacker into position to be able to take down Kirk until he had pretty much already ran the ball into the end zone

The Illinois Republicans need a good draught of TEApublicanism. What would have happened in this primary race if conservatives within the GOP had been able to organize and work with Tea Partiers and other independent grassroots conservative organizations to push for Hughes? We might be talking about nominee Hughes now. Even if Kirk had ended up winning, the race would definitely have been more competitive. Certainly, however, the Illinois GOP establishment would have had a run for its money.

But even more than just organizing to win a single primary election, Illinois needs grassroots conservatives to get involved and start taking the Illinois GOP over, one county at a time (especially with the massive and weighty Cook County Party). Flood the county conventions with numbers, and get conservatives put into place, regardless of the wishes of the current crop of establishment "leaders." Taking the Illinois GOP back for conservatism would help to prevent mistakes like a Mark Kirk candidacy from taking place again.

And what of those who try to argue that a solid conservative couldn't win in Illinois? Balderdash. Illinois is a state dominated by Cook County — but not totally controlled. Outside of Cook County, Illinois is actually a very Red state. A conservative who runs strong downstate WILL be able to win — and I would say especially in the current climate that favors conservatives and small-government activists. How do I know this? Because it has happened before. In 1998, Peter Fitzgerald, a conservative state Senator, defeated incumbent Democrat Carol Moseley Braun by 3% to take that seat. Fitzgerald was previously known as one of the "Fab Five" conservative Republicans who were often a thorn in the side of the moderate Illinois GOP leaders. In the Senate, he continued to be a conservative, opposing abortion, gun control, tax increases, and gay marriage. He was also the only Senator to oppose the post-911 bailout of the airline industry — taking a fiscally conservative stand when doing so was unpopular in the extreme. In the 1998 general election, Fitzgerald won all but five counties in Illinois, Cook County being one he didn't win, of course. More to the point, Fitzgerald also grasped the Republican nomination by defeating the establishment insider candidate Lolita Didrickson, the state Comptroller, who was strongly supported by the state Party apparatus. Despite this, Fitzgerald was able to emerge as a conservative insurgent and win.

Hence, we see that it can be done — if conservatives have the fortitude and political will to take on the entrenched Party interests and fight the good fight.

Now to the other state under analysis — Texas.

Texas has a primary coming up, and once again, we see that the GOP primary for an important statewide race is contested. In this case, the race is the Governorship, and the contest pits three Republican candidates against each other — sitting Governor Rick Perry, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, and Debra Medina, a business woman from Wharton County.

Conservatives have a lot to be dissatisfied with about the two establishment candidates. Hutchison is a RINO who supports gun control and abortion, and who has a mixed (at best) voting record on fiscal issues during her tenure in the Senate. Perry, who has generally has a conservative record and who has been moving even more to the Right in recent months (including becoming an advocate of states' rights), still has some black marks on his record as well, especially pertaining to his sovereignty-unfriendly support for the Trans-Texas Corridor and his executive order mandating that all Texan girls receive the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine, an anti-individual liberty move which was also tainted with the cloud of cronyism (the vaccine is produced solely by Merck, with whom Perry had financial connections).

So....this left conservatives with Medina, cast in the role of an outsider taking on the establishment. Because of this, Medina proclaimed herself to be the "Tea Party candidate," and indeed had tremendous support from the movement. Unfortunately, in a recent interview with Glenn Beck, Medina more or less outed herself as being sympathetic to the "911 truther" position, the view held by various and sundry kooks and whackos that the Bush administration and the US government were in on the 911 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, or at least knew about the plot in advance and did nothing to stop it. For instance, "Truthers" would say that the government planted strategic explosives to bring down the towers since burning jet fuel couldn't have done the job alone, or as one of their more common arguments runs, "Fire can't melt steel! Google it!"

As it turns out, I did google it, and it seems that people have been using fire to melt and make steel for millennia.

So much for that. But the example of Debra Medina illustrates a point about TEApublicanism, which is that while the Tea Party movement definitely is needed to circumvent the entrenched RINO GOP establishments at the local, state, and national level, the Tea Partiers need to be a little more selective about just which "outsiders" they bring in to support. I hate to say it, but often times, the reason someone is an outsider is because they deserve to be. While there is always the potential disadvantage of seeing entrenched cliques get into power, one of the obvious advantages of bona fide political parties is that they generally serve as a self-correcting body to vet candidates so as to weed out the kooks, whackos, nuts, and others who would make the Party look like a bunch of weirdoes (or at least who the media would use to do so). This needed to be done with Debra Medina — who, as it turns out, is a full-bore Ron Paul nut who deviates from authentic conservatism in a number of ways — but the zeal to find an "outsider" candidate short-circuited the much-needed candidate vetting process. Conservatives, within and without the GOP, both Tea Partiers and grassroots Republicans, should have gotten together and rallied to a candidate after deliberating on who would be the best small-government, fiscally-responsible, socially-conservative, sovereignty-protecting candidate available, someone without questionable ties to obvious kooks. Now it looks like were stuck with Trans-Texas Rick.

The Tea Parties need to watch themselves, because there is a concerted effort underway to hijack them being made by an assortment of fruits and nuts out there. The grassroots Reagan conservative message that originally endued the Tea Parties with a powerful and animating spirit is in danger of being drowned out by the Alex Jones-style conspiracy-mongers, selectively constitutionalist Ron Paulians, 911 Troofers, social libertarians, Third Partyist splitters, and others of this ilk. None of this is what the Tea Parties were about. The Tea Parties were not about blaming Bush for the 911 terrorist attacks. They were not about undercutting American military preparedness through the sour vinegar of isolationism. They were not about dividing conservatives into a myriad of third parties. None of this is the authentic Reagan conservatism that the Tea Parties are supposed to be about. The Tea Parties are supposed to be the reawakening of the conservative giant in American politics, not providing a ready-made soapbox to every nut out there who is "on the fringes" for good reason.

Case in point, Dale Robertson, a self-proclaimed "leader" of the Tea Party movement and founder of TeaParty.org. Dale's activism largely consists of being a hanger-on at legitimate Tea Parties, usually carrying signs comparing taxation to slavery and taxpayers to "n******s." In other words, he just the sort of nut that the news media looks for, so as to publicize him and make him look like he's "representative" of the Tea Partiers, so they can claim that all Tea Partiers are just crazy white people running around with signs that slur black people. Yet, because nobody organizes to present a united front and to present sound representation and stability for the movement, people like Dale have the opportunity to work their way in and present themselves as leaders, when they really aren't.

Fortunately, there are signs that legitimate Tea Partiers are moving to protect themselves from this attack. For instance, though Ron Paul and his followers claim that he is "the original Tea Partier" and try to connect the movement to Ron Paul's "Revolution," Paul himself is facing a stiff primary challenge....from a self-identified Tea Party candidate, presumably with the support of the local Tea Party organizers. It's pretty sad, and pretty telling about how much of an outlier you are to the movement, when the movement you claim as your own runs a candidate against you. Efforts at splitting the vote and rescuing the Democrats by starting "Tea Party" third parties in Florida and Nevada are floundering in large part because the local Tea Party leaders are having none of it. Indeed, I just got an email today from Tea Party Patriots, one of the larger nationwide Tea Party umbrella groups, roundly denouncing any efforts at starting a Third Party under the Tea Party label. The choice instead, for this large, nationally-known Tea Party group, is basically TEApublicanism — take over the GOP from the ground up, and use it as a vehicle to promote conservative principles.

Recently events in both Illinois and Texas provide some illuminating examples of the strengths and weaknesses of the current grassroots efforts underway, and why we need to unite behind TEApublicanism (which is a methodology and strategy, rather than a movement or party). We must hang together, else we hang separately.

© Tim Dunkin