Amongst all the comments about Harry Reid’s gaffes, the other big news in the world of Twitter and the blogs is the fact that Scott Brown, Republican candidate to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat in Massachusetts, raised over $1M in 24 hours. Polls over the weekend showed him neck-and-neck with his opponent Martha Coakley. While many other polls have shown Coakley with a sizable lead, the closeness of the one provided a massive boost to Republicans hoping to shock Democrats and take over a very safe seat. Conservatives and other activists have rallied to Brown’s cause, hoping that a victory would shatter the 60-vote majority needed to pass the ugly beast known as ObamaCare.
Now, the truth is Brown likely won’t win, though it may be closer than Democrats would wish. And even if he did, Democrats have promised not to seat him until after ObamaCare comes to a final vote, if they can manage it. So in reality the hopes for taking the 41st seat and killing ObamaCare are slim. But the reaction from conservatives is the real story here. Facing the seemingly insurmountable task of turning Ted Kennedy’s seat red, and a less than ideal candidate, money and support have been pouring out for Brown. The “tea party” engine has been turned on in this freezing January and is helping push out the votes for the mid-winter special election, generally a very low-turnout affair. Democrats in turn have gone full-bore for Coakley, producing some very nasty ads.
I think this distills a major decision for tea party activists, and one it appears they are making correctly. Brown is far from being a pure-bred conservative – among other things, he is pro-choice – but he seems to get the idea that opposing big government is the right course. True hard-core conservatives could find plenty of other things to not like about Scott Brown, but the point is this – the movement, by and large, has decided that the most important thing now is not Roe v. Wade (which isn’t coming up to a vote any time soon) but fighting Obama-style massive government. They made the correct decision on another important case, in rejecting Dede Scozzafava, a figure so far from resembling anything like a Republican that she ended up endorsing the Democrat. There is a line to be drawn, for sure, and for now it appears the tea partiers are making the right one.
More choices like this are surely on the horizon. And thus distills the constant battle many of us endure, as people who stand on the ideological end of the GOP, calling ourselves libertarians, conservatives, or whatever other label one might use. The temptation will always be there to swallow the establishment line and support the machine candidate, even if he stands for nothing. I believe such is our choice in the upcoming Pennsylvania gubernatorial primaries, in choosing between mediocre “party” candidate Tom Corbett and principled conservative Sam Rohrer. It’s my hope we will choose wisely there and elsewhere. But at the same time, we mustn’t be too purist either. We can’t kick someone out just for being pro-choice or supporting civil unions. We’ve got to stand for something and be rational at the same time. If we do so, we can restore responsible leadership to Washington.