Tea Party II
The talk in Washington this week is Ted Cruz’s “outside” win the Texas Republican primary. Cruz, an accomplished intellectual that hails from Princeton and Harvard Law School, rode his Tea Party campaign to victory of the GOP establishments chosen successor to exiting Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst. Cruz, whose candidacy was both fiscally and socially conservative, was an open-embracer of the Tea Party. Did Cruz ride the Tea Party’s national popularity to victory? No. Tea Party ratings, for the most part, have been in the tank, in most recent polling even falling below both Occupy Wall St. and Mitt Romney’s former investment firm, Bain Capital. It seems that Cruz’s victory was yet another rebuke of Washington, and more importantly, political parties being the deciders of who should fill the halls of the Senate. Cruz’s victory looks to be bookended by the primary defeat pf longtime Senate Stalwart Richard Lugar of Indiana, also by a Tea-Party candidate, and potentially Wisconsin political icon Tommy Thompson. Thompson, a popular former Governor and cabinet secretary, now amazingly trails his GOP primary opponents, both from his right, in the upcoming Wisconsin Republican primary election. All this means that whatever happens in November in the presidential election, Mitch McConnell, the chief tasked with keeping Republicans in lock step with party leadership, is in for a very tough time.
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