Another headache for Republicans
Well, it looks like the Republican Party has a lot of second-guessing to do. Virginia’s 7th District, seven-term House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, is now heading for the unemployment line come next January.
Gee, I wonder if he’ll try to extend those long-term unemployment benefits before then. He just might need them in the future.
Cantor had been seen as a sure thing to win an eighth term. The tea party got in the way.
Cantor had a huge fundraising edge ($5,447,290 to $206,663) over political newcomer David Brat. That really didn’t matter.
Brat painted Cantor as a traitor to conservatives, because he’d voted to raise the debt ceiling; to end the Republican-led government shutdown; and he made some vague small-talk about immigration reform. Of course, Brat never called it immigration reform — just “amnesty.”
And, I suppose, because Cantor never tried to give President Obama a swift kick to his solar-plexus, Brat had another reason to oust Cantor.
The result was a resoundingly shocking defeat for one of the Republican Party’s most visible leaders, who’d once enjoyed being known as one of the “Young Guns” of among congressional Republicans.
Brat, an economics and ethics professor at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Va., is also a guy who seems to have supported the much-criticized, mainly-conservative philosophies of Ayn Rand. So much so that he co-authored a paper titled, “An Analysis of the Moral Foundations in Ayn Rand.” Cantor, though, ignored Brat’s affinities for Ayn Rand, and he still labeled Brat a “liberal economics professor.” That miscalculation obviously backfired.
Cantor won re-election in 2012 by whopping 17 percent. Last Tuesday night, he lost to the underfunded Brat in Virginia’s Republican primary election by 12 percent. By Wednesday morning, with Republicans and Democrats trying to figure out just what had happened, Cantor announced he was planning to step down from his House leadership post.
Brat, himself, even seemed surprised by his victory. He appeared (by phone) a few hours after the final votes were counted on MSNBC, and he revealed that he wasn’t quite ready to talk in boilerplate, political-speak just yet. When asked a series of policy questions, Brat exclaimed, “My mind today is just … I love all the policy questions. I’m happy to do them more. But I just wanted to thank everybody for the victory.”
In other words, “I’m not quite up to snuff on this political double-speak, yet. Let me talk to my campaign staff, and I’ll come up with some answers for you.”
Meanwhile, Democrats don’t seem very confident that they’ll be able to win Cantor’s seat in the fall. They’re fielding another political novice, Jack Trammell, who was hand-picked to run against Cantor by a Democratic nominating committee, because no other Democrat had any hopes of unseating Cantor. Ironically, Trammell also teaches at Randolph-Macon College. He’s an associate professor of sociology, specializing in disability issues in higher learning.
Brat and Trammell might hold their debates in the teacher’s lounge.
The Trammell campaign — to the extent there is one — might also be heartened by Cantor’s demise, and Brat’s rise, but Trammell surely knows he’ll have an uphill fight.
Meanwhile, at least one mainstream Republican House member, Peter King of New York, sees Cantor’s loss as a warning sign to his fellow Republicans.
King has been a strident critic of the tea party’s growing influence in Congress. In the past, he’s railed against Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul for their close association with the tea party. “My concern is a lot of things are going to be dead and pushed aside,” King says.
“I’m concerned that the Ted Cruz supporters, the Rand Paul supporters, are going to use this as an excuse to basically stop the government from functioning,” he added. King really should know that before you stop something like the government, perhaps you really should start it first.
It’s not like the Republican-led House, with Eric Cantor in leadership, has passed a wheelbarrow full of pass-worthy legislation this session.
Voting on bill after bill to repeal Obamacare doesn’t constitute a robust Republican agenda.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. Email him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net