Republicans’ problems are bigger than the Tea Party

The GOP is blaming Akin and Mourdock for its blowout Senate defeat. It might want to look at its policies instead

BY JAMELLE BOUIE, THE AMERICAN PROSPECT

If there was anything Republicans should have been surprised about in this month’s elections, it was their rout in the Senate. Not only did they lose races against vulnerable Democratic incumbents in GOP leaning states—Missouri, Florida, and Montana, for instance—but they also lost almost every competitive open race and failed to hold a vacant one in Indiana.

Politico reports that GOP leaders are working to prevent a repeat of this scenario by exerting more control over the nomination process. Republicans believe that they would have done better had they kept politicians like Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock out of the picture. The goal for the next four years is to erase the Tea Party-versus-Washington narrative that has made it difficult to get establishment Republicans through the primary process:

“We ought to make certain that if we get engaged in primaries that we’re doing it based on the desires, the electability and the input of people back in the states that we’re talking about,” Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, the incoming National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, told POLITICO. “And not from the perception of what political operatives from Washington, D.C., think about who ought to be the candidate in state X.”

The first-term Moran, who was elected to the spot last week by his Senate colleagues, tapped incoming Texas freshman Sen. Ted Cruz as a vice chairman for grass roots and outreach. The plan, according to party leaders, is to employ Cruz’s tea party star power to help win over activist groups that may be wary of the NRSC and help unify the GOP behind a single candidate in crucial Senate races.

It’s good that Republicans want to bridge the divides in their party, but—like the focus on immigration by Republican leaders in the wake of Mitt Romney’s defeat—this is a misreading of what happened on Election Day. Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were the only two candidates who could plausibly be associated with the Tea Party, and in the case of the former, it’s hard to say that he was the standard-bearer for Missouri conservatives; the state treasurer, Sarah Steelman, had received endorsements from Sarah Palin and the Tea Party Express and was as much a candidate of the right as Akin was.

complete article:
http://www.salon.com/2012/11/19/republicans_problems_are_bigger_than_the_tea_party/