Congratulations, David Brat: Your Win over Eric Cantor is Totally Meaningless

David Brat ran against Eric Cantor as the epitome of everything that's wrong with Washington. It wasn't a bad synecdoche; like the city, Cantor exuded southern efficiency and northern charm. By the standards of the Tea Party, however, Cantor simply wasn't inefficient enough. They would like less done, please.

On the other hand, Cantor's lack of personal charm probably didn't mean much in terms of the race – though you can see how years of terse brush-offs to reporters has already given the coverage a particularly giddy aftertaste. (See: "DC is running out of champagne".) Neither the left nor right will miss Cantor much, even if David Brat might. The Randolph-Macon College economics professor will never be more important to the Washington political class than he is right now, after defeating the House majority leader by double digits in their primary on Tuesday night.

In other words, Professor Brat, I have some bad news: it's all downhill from here. At least for you, personally. You are neither the death knell for immigration reform nor the prime mover of the GOP agenda. You are the victor in a 65,008-person vote that came down to rural Virginia. And your legacy as a harbinger of things to come is even more in doubt: there is no clean Tea Party electoral narrative at this point in the midterms – only Beltway political journalists believe in clean narratives anyway.

But as Cantor's vanquisher, Brat nonetheless became an overnight symbol for Tea Party and its future. News that Cantor spent over $150,000 at steakhouses during the campaign had to be squared with having failed to serve up sufficiently red meat. And the March Madness-level magnitude of the upset gave the coverage an hysterical edge. Both left and right raced to be the side most please by the outcome. (Indeed, any more Tea Party upsets and this might be the election cycle when I finally learn to spell schadenfreude.)