By Peggy Noonan
One of the great
questions about the 2012 campaign has been “Where was the tea party?”
They were not the fierce force they’d been in the 2010 cycle, when
Republicans took back the House. Some of us think the answer to the
question is: “Targeted by the IRS, buried under paperwork and unable to
raise money.”
The economist Stan Veuger, on the American Enterprise Institute‘s blog, takes the question a step further.
The Democrats had been badly shaken by the Republican comeback of
2010. They feared a repeat in 2012 that would lose them the White
House.
Might targeting the tea-party groups—diverting them, keeping them
from forming and operating—seem a shrewd campaign strategy in the years
between 2010 and 2012? Sure. Underhanded and illegal, but potentially
effective.
Veuger writes: “It is a well-known fact that the Tea Party movement
dealt the president his famous “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm
election. Less well-known is the actual number of votes this new
movement delivered—and the continuing effects these votes could have had
in 2012 had the movement not been demobilized by the IRS.”
The research paper Veurger and his colleagues have put out notes
that, in Veuger’s words, “the Tea Party movement’s huge success [in
2010] was not the result of a few days of work by an elected official or
two, but involved activists all over the country who spent the year and
a half leading up to the midterm elections volunteering, organizing,
donating, and rallying. Much of these grassroots activities were
centered around 501(c)4s, which according to our research were an
important component of the Tea Party movement and its rise.”
More: “The bottom line is that the Tea Party movement, when properly
activated, can generate a huge number of votes—more votes in 2010, in
fact, than the vote advantage Obama held over Romney in 2012. The data
show that had the Tea Party groups continued to grow at the pace seen in
2009 and 2010, and had their effect on the 2012 vote been similar to
that seen in 2010, they would have brought the Republican Party as many
as 5-8.5 million votes compared to Obama’s victory margin of 5 million.”
Think about the sheer political facts of the president’s 2012
victory. The first thing we learned, in the weeks after the voting, was
that the Obama campaign was operating with a huge edge in its
technological operation—its vast digital capability and sophistication.
The second thing we learned, in the past month, is that while the
campaign was on, the president’s fiercest foes, in the Tea Party, were
being thwarted, diverted and stopped.
Technological savvy plus IRS corruption. The president’s victory now
looks colder, more sordid, than it did. Which is why our editor, James Taranto, calls him “President Asterisk.”
2 comments:
"Secret Laws, Secret Court rulings..."
http://actwellyourpart.blogspot.com/2013/06/secret-laws-secret-court-rulings.html
After the exposure of the IRS, DoJ, SoS and NSA actions and illegalities, why shouldn't I believe that the NSA shared information with the Obama Campaign. Where are the firings and the indictments. Bush was attached for firing his US attorney political appointments, and now NO US Attorney will stand by the rule of law, yet few, if any, criticize that reality.
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