Column by Chris Graham
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I had a good conversation with a colleague today who happens to be a Tea Partier. I told him how I was planning to write a column today on the shocking vote in Utah over the weekend that ousted Sen. Bob Bennett from the upcoming Senate Republican primary, and how it seems to me that the Tea Party is running the risk of making itself and the Republican Party electorally irrelevant by demanding strict ultraconservtive ideological purity.
And then something occurred to me: that Democrats are hurtling down that same path, and that the evidence was in my e-mail in-box this morning.
It was an invitation from a fellow local Democratic Party chair, actually, to become a fan of a Facebook page titled T-MAC FACTS, which is actually a page for Virginia Democrats who aren’t, shall we say, fond of former and future gubernatorial-nomination candidate Terry McAuliffe to make funnies.
A fan of political humor myself, yeah, it does its job there. (One post: Terry McAuliffe was once stopped at a military checkpoint in western Russia. Moments later Soviet Russia collapsed and the Cold War ended. You do not stop Terry McAuliffe on a beer run. Ever. Another: Terry McAulliffe isn’t using the Mark Warner model to run for governor. Terry had Mark Warner use it first to make sure it worked. A third: Terry once bowled a 300. Without a ball. He wasn’t even in a bowling alley.)
Funny stuff. Which also reminds me of why Democrats lost the state elections last year. The folks generating the T-Mac love here are the same who pushed the debacle that was the nomination of Creigh Deeds in 2009.
Who can forget Deeds? Maybe one day we’ll find out that he actually had a campaign platform beyond “Bob McDonnell wrote a thesis in 1989,” though it’s doubtful. In the meantime, we can thank the far left that propped up his nonstarter of a campaign for dumping into the sewer eight years of gains made possible by the likes of Mark Warner and Tim Kaine and Jim Webb and in the process breathing life into the reign of terror of one Kenneth Cuccinelli.
And with efforts like T-MAC FACTS, we can guarantee that the nonsense from the far left in the Democratic Party isn’t over by a long shot. This is the same group that holds its nose when talking about Warner, a former governor now in the U.S. Senate, because Warner plays it down the center on social issues and actually makes it a point to seek out middle ground with (shudder!) Republicans on important issues of the day.
Barack Obama is now in their crosshairs for the same. (How dare he become the first president to actually achieve health-care reform by … trying to reach a bipartisan consensus!)
The Tea Party movement is going to serve as a brake on Republicans in 2010 and 2012 by keeping the party much further to the right than it would be ideally from a political perspective.
Well, Democrats appear to have their own Latte Party problem on their hands.
(My favorite line from T-MAC FACTS: Superman may wear Jack Bauer pajamas, but Jack Bauer wears Terry McAuliffe pajamas.)
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Chris Graham
