The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, is cross-posted from HuffPo:
It takes completely brazen chutzpah for Neo-Con Republicans like John McCain to criticize President Obama’s policies in Iraq — especially as Iraq once again falls into sectarian civil war.
These are precisely the people who kicked open the sectarian hornets’ nest in 2003 when they invaded Iraq and unleashed years of civil war that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of refugees.
Of course the current Iraqi government bears a great deal of the responsibility for the current breakdown in security. As Fareed Zakaria wrote in Friday’s Washington Post:

The prime minister and his ruling party have behaved like thugs, excluding the Sunnis from power, using the army, police forces and militias to terrorize their opponents.

The Sunni insurrection that began in 2003 was finally tamped down by General David Petraeus when he engineered power-sharing arrangements between the Shiites and key elements of the Sunni community. Prime Minister Maliki has systematically abrogated many of those deals, reneged on commitments and created the conditions where Sunni insurgents have real sympathy among many in the Sunni population.
That is why the Obama Administration has insisted that increases in U.S. military assistance be conditioned on major changes that help create a political system inclusive of all of the elements in Iraqi society.
Remember that Maliki came to power as a result of the decisions of the Neo-Cons in the Bush Administration who intentionally dismantled all vestiges of Sunni power — including the Iraqi Army and bureaucracy — shortly after the invasion.
And, most importantly, the invasion that unleashed the sectarian civil war was sold to the American people as a quest to eliminate Sadam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction — and as a means of destroying his non-existent links to Al Qaeda.
How ironic that the Neo-Con invasion itself created the conditions that allowed Al Qaeda-inspired organizations like Al Qaeda in Iraq — and now the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS) — to become viable forces in the country.
Now, Neo-Cons like McCain are calling on the President to “bring back” the Bush team “who knew how to win.” Unbelievable. The people who led us into the Iraq War have no business even commenting on foreign policy — much less managing it. In fact, any self-respecting television network should simply ignore anything they have to say, since they led us into the worst foreign policy disaster in half a century.
The Iraq War will ultimately cost the American taxpayers trillions of dollars. It caused the collapse of our international reputation. It costs hundreds of thousands of lives — including 4.500 American soldiers, and it wounded and maimed hundreds of thousands more. And the Iraq War unleashed simmering sectarian conflicts that had existed for centuries throughout the Middle East.
Now those sectarian conflicts have spilled over into an awful civil war in Syria and are part and parcel of international tensions throughout the region. And these “geniuses” should be brought back to manage Iraq policy?
Oh, they say, President Obama should have been a tougher negotiator when it came to maintaining a residual force of training personnel in Iraq. But that ignores that the Maliki government refused to agree to conditions that every other country in the world provides for Americans who are stationed on their soil. The fact is that Maliki did not want American troops to remain in Iraq because he is entirely beholden to the Iranians who did not want any residual American troops in Iraq.
But that, of course, is beside the point where most Americans are concerned. The vast majority of Americans didn’t want to maintain a residual force of American troops in Iraq either. They wanted to end America’s involvement in the Iraq War — and do not want American troops to be sent back to Iraq or any other war in the Middle East.
In fact, Republican attacks on President Obama because he “didn’t finish the job” in Iraq run head-long into the buzz saw of American public opinion. It is completely out of touch with the views of ordinary Americans.
The main reason why President Obama is now faced with having to do everything he can to help stabilize the situation in Iraq — short of sending back American troops — is that the Republican Neo-Con gang kicked over the sectarian hornets’ nest with their pointless invasion and macho military adventurism in the first place.
Remember President Bush’s “mission accomplished” on the carrier deck back on May 1, 2003. That was over a decade ago. The mission was “accomplished” only if the goal was to destabilize the Middle East, cost America trillions of our treasure and kill and maim hundreds of thousands of human beings.
The people who conceived and executed the invasion of Iraq don’t deserve to be given the authority to run a lemonade stand, much less U.S. foreign policy.
And personally, the only thing I want to hear from any of them is an apology.

The following article By Dennis Kelleher, Better Markets and Anna Greenberg is cross-posted from the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research web pages:
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research.
Pundits have blamed Eric Cantor’s shocking upset in the Virginia 7th District Republican primary on many things, from immigration, to the broader alienation of “establishment” Republicans from their activist, Tea Party base, to Cantor’s poor performance minding his own district. But challenger David Brat put the coddling of big banks and Wall Street at the center of his campaign. For example, in a radio interview last month, Brat said:
“The crooks up on Wall Street and some of the big banks — I’m pro-business, I’m just talking about the crooks — they didn’t go to jail, they are on Eric’s Rolodex.”
In his campaign, Brat emphasized corruption, bailouts and Wall Street as much as immigration and other issues.
Republican primary voters in the Richmond suburbs are in good company with voters across the country fed up with Wall Street and frustrated with Washington’s complicity in protecting Wall Street’s too-big-to-fail bankers and their high risk gambling and egregious law breaking. Recent research, including a new national survey of 1,000 likely voters, makes it clear that voters not only distrust Wall Street and big banks, but want strong, serious reform. Voters believe financial markets are “rigged for insiders,” and “hurt everyday Americans.”
A strong, bipartisan majority of likely 2014 voters support stricter federal regulations on the way banks and other financial institutions conduct their business. Voters want accountability and do not want Wall Street pretending to police themselves: they want real cops back on the Wall Street beat enforcing the law.
Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, on behalf of Better Markets, conducted a national survey of 1,000 likely 2014 voters exploring reactions to financial actors, support for financial reform and voters’ understanding of how Wall Street impacts the economy and American people. This survey was informed by two national, online focus groups and a linguistic analysis on the discourse of financial reform.
Key Findings:
Voters still regard Wall Street and big banks as “bad actors.” A 64 percent majority believes “the stock market is rigged for insiders and people who know how to manipulate the system.” Another 55 percent majority believes “Wall Street and big banks hurt everyday Americans by pouring money into ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes rather than real businesses and investments.” Therefore, not surprisingly, most financial institutions generate huge negatives among voters.
Figure 1: Favorability of Financial Actors

A 60 percent majority favors “stricter regulation on the way banks and other financial institutions conduct their business,” and just 28 percent oppose. Strong supporters outnumber strong opponents by a 35 to 15 percent margin. These findings are consistent with other public data on this issue. Moreover, a battery of pro-reform messages moves support for reform from 60 percent favor to 72 percent and strong support jumps from 35 percent to 46 percent.
Figure 2: Support for Stricter Regulations on Financial Institutions

Support for stricter regulations inspires bipartisan support. Tea Party Republicans in the 7th District are not alone in wanting Washington to protect them from Wall Street. Stricter regulations generate large and wide partisan support, including among Democrats (74 percent favor, 17 percent oppose) and Independents (56 percent favor, 32 percent oppose), as well as a comfortable plurality of all Republicans (46 percent favor, 39 percent oppose). Most notably, voters who own stocks are slightly more likely to support stricter regulation than voters overall (63 percent favor, 27 percent oppose).
Voters see and condemn existing government efforts to regulate financial markets as a failure. An 89 percent majority of voters rate the federal government’s work here as “only fair” or “poor.” In the focus group, voters described the government as complicit in Wall Street abuse. As one participant noted, “the government is actually in bed with the banks.”
There is urgency to this issue. Voters believe another crash is likely and that regulation can help prevent another disaster. An 83 percent majority of voters believe another crash is likely within the next 10 years, and 43 percent very likely. Another 55 percent, however, agree “Stronger rules on Wall Street and big financial institutions by the federal government will help prevent another financial collapse.”
Conclusion:
Cantor lost in no small measure because he forgot that voters want their own interests represented. Voters do not want politicians putting the interests of K Street lobbyists and Wall Street ahead of their interests. This view is shared by voters throughout the country. This research suggests that ignoring voters’ anger with Wall Street–and its protectors in Washington–comes at incumbents’ own peril.

The American Prospect’s Paul Waldman mulls over the impact of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy on both Democrats and Republicans and comes up with some interesting insights:

…Hillary Clinton was the candidate of liberals’ heads, while Barack Obama became the candidate of their hearts. He may not have had a résumé as lengthy as hers or quite the stamina for endless policy discussion that she had, but he could stir voters’ souls and offer them the promise of transformation. She, on the other hand, offered something much more grounded, even a little grim. “Making change is not about what you believe,” she said during one debate. “It’s not about a speech you make. It’s about working hard.” It was a realistic and accurate assessment, but not exactly one to make you flush with excitement.
And as she moves toward another presidential candidacy, Clinton’s appeal for Democrats is still to the head. She won’t be an ideological warrior and she may not put a catch in your throat with soaring rhetoric, but she’s smart, competent, and experienced. You don’t have to love her, you just have to hire her.

No doubt there are plenty of Democrats and some swing voters who are thrilled and inspired by the possibility of Clinton’s candidacy, while acknowledging that speech delivery is not her strong card. But Waldman’s point about Clinton’s work ethic is a good one. No Republican is going to out-work Hillary Clinton. She is a battle-tested warhorse who has taken the worst her adversaries have thrown at her and emerged stronger and more appealing than ever. And she drives the Republicans nuts, as Waldman explains:

For Republicans, on the other hand, Clinton is most emphatically a candidate of the heart. They may be able to come up with more than enough rational reasons to oppose her, but their feelings are powerful and primal. It took a while for Republicans to work up an intense dislike of Barack Obama; in fact, when he first emerged, conservatives were falling all over themselves to praise him. But Hillary Clinton comes pre-loathed.
The hatred (and that isn’t too strong a word to use) many conservatives feel toward Clinton could be one of her greatest assets should she become the Democratic nominee. As far as they’re concerned, her record as a center-left Democrat–the very thing that gives so many liberals pause–is but a ruse concealing a radical agenda, to be revealed when she takes office and casts aside the cloak of moderation she has worn for two decades. As is so often the case when we truly detest a political figure, they are convinced that nothing she says is sincere, and no position, no matter how long-held, is the product of anything but the most cynical political calculation.

The conservative ideologues hate President Obama on a visceral level, and after the briefest of honeymoons, openly declared all-out war on everything he did. He wasn’t quite ready for the level of unprecedented abuse he had to endure. But he has handled himself with impressive grace, even though he was naive about prospects for bipartisanship for too long. You could also argue that he has played his hand about as well as he could.
Clinton will have a unique advantage if she runs and gets elected, because she has already taken an incredible amount of abuse and vilification, and she is as tough as any Democrat. The ascending bigots in the Republican Party will fight ugly, as many of them did with Obama. But she will have the seasoning to handle whatever they hurl at her, plus she will know her opposition better after watching their antics throughout the Obama Administration. As Waldman concludes,

As for Clinton, she may be a better candidate than she was in 2008, but she can’t be a wholly different one. She’ll demonstrate her deep knowledge of policy both foreign and domestic. She’ll be a tireless campaigner. Her speeches will be thoughtful and thorough, delivered well enough to make you say, “That was good,” even if you don’t have to wipe away any tears…Like every other candidate, Hillary Clinton is who she is, for both better and worse. She may not make your spirit soar. But she probably won’t have to.

Clinton still bristles under media scrutiny occasionally, though she handles criticism with more grace and humor nowadays. No doubt her temperament will gain further polish and wisdom in the months ahead. Democrats haven’t had a better-prepared candidate since FDR’s third campaign. The Republicans know it, and they have good reason to be worried. Her nomination and election are not a sure thing, contrary to prevailing media wisdom. Much depends on the economic recovery leading up to November, 2016 and other wild cards. But she is looking stronger every day.

From E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s WaPo column “An election campaign with too little focus on economic concerns“: “The nature of the public discussion has been a strategic advantage for the GOP…Bread-and-butter concerns are the stuff of Democratic victories because the polls show that most voters still think of the GOP as more protective of the interests of the wealthy than of their own. The less we hear about economics, the better it is for Republicans.”
At Politico and the Crystal Ball Larry J. Sabato has the definitive (for the moment) update on 36 governor’s races in 2014, and notes “the governorship map leans slightly toward Democrats because a few GOP executives elected in the 2010 Republican landslide are vulnerable in blue or competitive states.”
…And Laura Clawson’s Daily Kos post “Chris Christie isn’t the only governor to rob worker pensions to balance a budget” provides some ammo for enlarging that edge, particularly with high-turnout seniors.
In starker-than-ever contrast to their opposition, Matthew Yglesias offers “7 reasons the Democratic coalition is more united than ever” at Vox.
A couple of good quotes from “Giddy Dems’ new strategy: Watch the GOP implode” by Politico’s Edward-Isaac Dovere and Carrie Budoff Brown: “”The narrative has changed,” said Democratic National Committee communications director Mo Elleithee. “To the extent that this election is a referendum on who has broken Washington and left the middle class twisting in the wind, the spotlight is focused squarely on House Republicans.”…”From the Democratic perspective, it goes to the heart of the contrast between Democrats and Republicans” on economic issues and which party will fight for the middle class, said Obama pollster Joel Benenson. “That is something Democrats in tough districts and swing districts should be able to run on and capitalize on.”
In his Upshot post, “Why Hispanics Don’t Have a larger Voice,” NaTe Cohn expo;wins: “The explanation for the gap starts with the most basic rules of voter eligibility. People must be over age 18 to vote, and 28 percent of American Hispanics are under 18, compared with 22 percent of non-Hispanics. Voting-age adults must be United States citizens to vote, yet only 69 percent of adult Hispanics are citizens, compared with 96 percent of adult non-Hispanics.”
But Dems are in good position with Latinos who can vote, as Ronald Brownstein argues in his take at The Atlantic: “Eric Cantor’s Loss Is Hillary Clinton’s Gain: The majority leader’s loss means Republicans won’t take up immigration reform before November–and maybe not before 2016. That’s good news for Democrats.” Brownstein adds further, “…it’s a stiff bet for Republicans to gamble 2016 on holding Clinton below the 39 percent of whites Obama carried in 2012…In that meager showing, Obama lost white women by 14 percentage points, the biggest deficit for any Democrat since Reagan’s second landslide in 1984. As the first female presidential nominee, Clinton might easily do better, perhaps much better. And because Obama already fell so far with white men, there might not be much further for her to fall. Simultaneously, the power of the Clinton name equips her to continue generating lopsided margins with minority voters–unless Republicans find ways to reach them.”
An important step toward reinvigorating the labor movement. Meanwhile, here’s a good film on the topic.
Hmmm. Paul Rosenberg is on to something in his Salon post “Ugly, paranoid, divisive politics: The GOP are all Know-Nothings now” likening the Republicans’ current nativist leaders to Scorsese’s “Bill the Butcher.”

Some of the incomprehension progressives are expressing about the rage of people like the voters who croaked the career of Eric Cantor may reflect an inadequate understanding of how they view political history. Here’s the reminder I offered at Washington Monthly today.

[T]here’s an important aspect of conservative grievances with the Republican Establishment that makes all the talk of immigration reform or the Ryan-Murray Budget or Defunding Obamacare being the catalyst for revolt more than a little short-sighted. It was nicely articulated by RCP’s Sean Trende on Wednesday:

[A]nalysts need to understand that the Republican base is furious with the Republican establishment, especially over the Bush years. From the point of view of conservatives I’ve spoken with, the early- to mid-2000s look like this: Voters gave Republicans control of Congress and the presidency for the longest stretch since the 1920s.
And what do Republicans have to show for it? Temporary tax cuts, No Child Left Behind, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, a new Cabinet department, increased federal spending, TARP, and repeated attempts at immigration reform. Basically, despite a historic opportunity to shrink government, almost everything that the GOP establishment achieved during that time moved the needle leftward on domestic policy. Probably the only unambiguous win for conservatives were the Roberts and Alito appointments to the Supreme Court; the former is viewed with suspicion today while the latter only came about after the base revolted against Harriet Miers.
The icing on the cake for conservatives is that these moves were justified through an argument that they were necessary to continue to win elections and take issues off the table for Democrats. Instead, Bush’s presidency was followed in 2008 by the most liberal Democratic presidency since Lyndon Johnson, accompanied by sizable Democratic House and Senate majorities.
You don’t have to sympathize with this view, but if you don’t understand it, you will never understand the Tea Party.

I personally plead innocence to the charge of failing to understand the deep movement-conservative grievances against W., which reinforced the sense of mistrust and betrayal generated by Poppy and feeds negative feelings towards Jebbie. But as Paul Waldman notes at the Prospect, this is a difficult perspective for many liberals to “get.”
It’s worth remembering that even the sainted Ronald Reagan experienced a bit of a conservative backlash during his second term in office. In a very real sense, the last Republican leader fully trusted by movement conservatives was Barry Goldwater, and it’s his legacy today’s conservative insurgents are carrying forward a half-century after the fact.

This is why I’m a bit skeptical towards the theory that what gives the right-wing Tea Folk their mojo is an unprecedented anti-Wall Street “populism” that is likely to erupt in the Democratic Party as well. Yes, there is hostility to TARP and “crony capitalism” across the spectrum. But the very particular “populism” of the right is one that is furious at virtually every expansion of the federal government since the 1930s. It’s not new, just renewed, and angrier than ever.

The following article by Democratic strategist Mike Lux, author of “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Pundits are always very quick to come up with the key reason that something surprising (something that none of them predicted) happened politically. Because these explanations are usually off the top of their heads prognostications, backed up by no actual statistics or maybe one random fact someone pulled out of an exit poll, they quite frequently have little or no truth to them.
The Eric Cantor upset has been a field day for the random, off-the-top-of-their-head pundit theories. We heard that the shocking defeat was caused by rural voters turning on Cantor, but that was quickly debunked. We heard that the problem was redistricting, but the district really is very similar to the last district he had, and he’s already had one cycle in the new district for the few new voters there are to get used to him. We heard that the surprise might be due to anti-Semitism, but the rural numbers linked to above and the fact that Cantor has been elected for many years in essentially the same district, plus that little point that there is absolutely no evidence for this idea, tend to undercut that thesis. Then there is the idea that Democrats strategically going to the polls to kick Cantor out, but again those little things called statistics undercut this theory.
Finally, of course, there is the theory that pundits and right wingers immediately jumped on: It was all about the immigration issue, since the tea party guy running against Cantor is even more virulently anti-immigrant in his rhetoric than Cantor had been. Again, not a shred of actual proof on this theory, but that didn’t keep the nativists and pundits from jumping all over that one. Fortunately, there are smart people like David Jarman who know how to actually look at voting statistics to figure out whether there is anything to all to many of these theories. His summary answer: None of them hold water.
The fact is that Eric Cantor was an arrogant man. He was far more interested in running for speaker than in looking after folks back home. The taking care of your constituents thing is politics 101, and he flunked that test dramatically. But there is something closely related to the taking care of your constituents thing that is going on here, and all you have strong to do is to look at the rhetoric of his opponent to figure it out. Check out this important article from Lee Fang,and look at Brat’s (Cantor’s opponent) language on the campaign trail. Quotes from Brat from Fang’s article:
“All of the investment banks, up in New York and D.C., they should have gone to jail.”
“Eric Cantor and the Republican leadership do not know what a free market is at all, and the clearest evidence of that is the financial crisis … When I say free markets, I mean no favoritism to K Street lobbyists.”
“Eric is running on Chamber of Commerce and Business Roundtable principles,” Brat told a town hall audience, later clarifying that he meant the US Chamber of Commerce, the largest lobbying trade group in the country. He also called out the American Chemistry Council for funding ads in his race with Cantor, telling a radio host that his opponent had asked his “crony capitalist friends to run more ads.” Brat repeats his mantra: “I’m not against business. I’m against big business in bed with big government.”
Now obviously, Dave Brat is no progressive populist. He is a virulently anti-immigrant, far-right conservative on a great many issues, and that helped him with the anti-establishment tea party crowd that voted in force in Virginia’s Republican primary. But Brat ran his campaign much more on these populist economic outsider themes than on anything else, and given that Cantor came across to his district as the ultimate insider, as caring more about K Street and special interest fundraising than about the folks back home, Brat’s message was the perfect formula to pull off the shocking upset.
Voters all over this country — left, right, and middle — are sick and tired of the way Washington works. They don’t like wealthy, powerful, special interest lobbyists swinging sweetheart insider deals. With all the big money paying for sleazy attack ads by innocuously named groups who don’t disclose their donors, Democrats would be well-served by taking K St and the Koch brothers on. The best way to do this is to be specific — tell voters, for example, who the Koch brothers are and why they are spending so much money running these sleazy ads. This terrific ad by Begich’s campaign in Alaska helped Begich enormously in his tough race for re-election. Democrats can win answering the why question: Why are these wealthy special interests spending so much money on ads attacking them? If voters understand what is going on and who is paying for these ads, they can win the message wars in spite of all the money being spent against them.
Eric Cantor’s upset shows that big money doesn’t always win, and that K St-bashing populism wins elections. Let’s hope that Democrats across the country take that to heart and fight back against the big money flooding their races.

The Upshot’s Nate Cohn presents compelling evidence from precinct and county data that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was not defeated by a wave of crossover Democrats.
GOP message guru Frank Luntz has a NYT op-ed, “Why Polling Fails: Republicans Couldn’t Predict Eric Cantor’s Loss” noting “Even if every scientific approach is applied perfectly, 5 percent of all polls will end up outside the margin of error…a poll is a useful tool for gaining insight and information, but it is only one arrow in the quiver. Without qualitative insight — talking with voters face to face to judge their mood, emotion, intensity and opinion — polls can be inconsequential, and occasionally wrong.”
In their introduction launching a series on the U.S. elections at The Guardian Paul Lewis and Dan Roberts argue “US midterm elections: Republicans could triumph – but it’s not a sure thing,” and note that top forecasters Nate Silver, Larry J. Sabato and teams from WaPo and the NYT “essentially agree on the big question about control of the Senate: it is too close to call.”
In the first installment of the Guardian series, “Political certainties beginning to fade in black-and-white Georgia As the US gears up for crucial midterm elections,” Paul Lewis reports from Georgia, where Republicans are swimming against a changing demographic tide,” the author notes: “If Perdue, 64, a gaffe-prone former CEO of Dollar General, secures his party’s nomination, Democrats will paint him as a Mitt Romney-style plutocrat with a shady corporate history. It is a characterisation they hope will contrast with Nunn’s commitment to public service…If Kingston, 59, who has represented a congressional district incorporating the city of Savannah since 1993, wins the runoff, Nunn’s team will seek to characterise him as a Washington insider. Nunn, on the other hand, will claim to be an outsider, untarnished by the political fray.”
U.S. District Judge Peter C. Economus has reinstated early voting (three days in advance of elections) for all eligible voters in Ohio.
Crystal Shepeard’s Care2 post “Single Women Will Make the Difference in the Midterm Elections” explains “…nearly a third of unmarried women are not registered to vote…unmarried women have had the largest increase in new eligible voters since the 2012 election with more than ten million new voters. Many of them are young and tend to not participate in large numbers in midterm elections. In 2012, if unmarried women voted in the same numbers as married women, the difference would have been an additional 6.5 million more votes cast.
NPR’s Maria Liasson has explained “Unmarried women are the single most important demographic this year. But unlike other “it” demographics (remember soccer moms?), single women are not a constituency that’s in play: They’re extremely reliable Democratic supporters…Single women make up about 25 percent of the electorate, and they’re growing fast as marriage rates decline. But while they are reliable supporters for the Democrats — that is, when they vote — they are not reliable voters: Between 2008 and 2010, the participation of unmarried women fell by about 20 points. And between 2012 and 2014, single women’s participation is expected to drop off by about the same rate…So single women present Democrats with a turnout problem, not a persuasion problem.” Liasson goes on to point out that the election of Terry McAuliffe as Governor of Virginia shows that it can be done, and NC is the best proving ground for the strategy ion 2014.
In another NPR post, “Easy On The Ears: GOP Ads Adapt To Reach Women Voters,” Liasson shows that Republicans are running scared of single women and softening GOP ad messaging in hopes of neutralizing their strong Democratic tilt.
Oh, Hell yes.

By now you’ve probably read all the basics about the stunning defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in VA-07 yesterday (if you haven’t, see J.P. Green’s earlier post). I’ll confine myself to a couple of brief excerpts from my take late last night at TPMCafe about the bigger picture:

For the first post-primary Wednesday this year, I’m not having to poke holes in the pre-ordained MSM narrative for this campaign cycle, The Year of the Republican Establishment, wherein the Great Big Adults of the GOP were supposed to put down the unruly Tea Folk and position their “pragmatic” party perfectly for smashing victories in 2014 and maybe 2016 as well. I’d say the Republican voters of the 7th congressional district of Virginia put that meme to rest for the immediate future.

Ah, but wasn’t Lindsey Graham’s easy win in SC a counter-indicator, showing mainly that Cantor just ran a bad campaign which other Republicans can write off as an anomaly? I don’t think that’s the lesson they’ll take:

It’s unclear yet what Cantor’s demise means in terms of the succession to power in the House GOP. But there’s little question this contest will reinforce the tendency of Republican officeholders everywhere to protect their right flanks with all their might, and that’s a more important victory for “constitutional conservatives” than having Dave Brat in the House.
Interestingly enough, a Republican incumbent initially considered far more vulnerable than Cantor, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, romped to victory yesterday without a runoff over a field of six opponents trying to exploit his RINO reputation. Graham had the same kind of financial advantage as Cantor enjoyed, but also made himself a chief purveyor of red meat to “the base” in his abrasive exploitation of the Benghazi! “scandal,” and more recently, his suggestion that Barack Obama was courting impeachment by his handling of the Bergdahl exchange.
Cantor has been a conspicuous sponsor of the “reform conservative” band of intellectuals encouraging Republicans to think more deeply about a positive governing agenda. He might have done better by emulating Graham and finding some decidedly non-intellectual buttons to push among right-wing activists. That’s a lesson that won’t be lost on Cantor’s soon-to-be-former colleagues in Congress, and on the emerging Republican field for president in 2016.

Sure, running a good campaign is always a good idea, and so, too, are good constituent services, which are qualities Lindsey Graham had and Eric Cantor lacked. But in the end, it was the tribute Graham paid to the ferocious Obama-haters in his party that probably made the difference. He’ll stick around the Senate to torment the administration on every foreign policy issue, while the orphans of the “reform conservative” movement shop their policy tomes around in search of a new patron.