While pundits sift through the ‘tea-leaves’ to learn the lessons of this midterm election, we hope that they realize this was a victory of the grass-roots, not the establishment GOP.  Winning candidates were those who had the backing of the tea party and 9-12 organizations and ran aggressive campaigns. Establishment candidates running saccharine campaigns mostly lost.

If the GOP is to capitalize on its success, it needs to incorporate the energy and commitment to principle displayed by the grass roots activists. It needs to realize that the game has really changed and the politics of the past two decades are over. Big Government has now learned that Rep. Michele Bachmann, one of the first GOP office-holders to recognize the importance of the tea party uprising, will enter the race for GOP Conference Chair.

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Sen. Orrin Hatch is up for reelection in 2012. On Wednesday, he used his considerable powers to ensure that Lisa Murkowski–who, you know, lost a GOP primary and continues to wage a Quixotic battle that may prevent a GOP win in Alaska–didn’t lose any of her “privileges” in the Senate.

Hatch had this howler for the Wall Street Journal:

“We all respect the system, and she still is a Republican senator,’’ said Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah.) after the closed party caucus. “It’s just a matter of good taste. We decided to keep the status quo as long as she’s a senator.’’

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There were three major surprises in the sometimes nasty Republican Senate primary results last night.  The first is the most obvious, Christine O’Donnell pulled off a stunning upset over nine-term Congress Mike Castle.

Tea Party conservative Christine O’Donnell knocked off longtime Republican insider milquetoast Mike Castle in the Delaware Republican primary Tuesday for the Senate seat once held in a lockbox by Vice President Joe Biden.

It’s another victory for the GOP rank and file, whose party leadership has abandoned them in recent years on its great detour into the wilderness of big-government leftism.

One of the lessons that leaped out at me in recent days, as O’Donnell stormed from out of nowhere to win, was the symbolic difference in the two candidates:

O’Donnell: pretty, young (41), wide-eyed, smiling and bright, marching off confidently from appearance to appearance with a strong conservative message. The very image of the girl next door.

Castle: old (71), weathered, worn, dour and gray, walking lamely and slowly. The very image of the tired old white-guy GOP that has turned off young voters at least since the days of Reagan, and maybe longer, pitching leftist policies from his RINO perch.

GOP leadership wants to cling to its tired, old, go-along-to-get-along image. The GOP rank and file, in primary after primary, is very clear in what it wants: young, new, vibrant, and conservative! They don’t want to go along to get along with big-government statism. They want to fight. They want to take back their country.

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As a surgeon, at least until ObamaCare goes into effect, I have been trained to dissect issues and results into their component parts. My current focus is on the similarities between the two biggest missed political opportunities over the past two years:

1. Senator McCain’s suspension of his campaign to fly back to D.C. to work out a “Bipartisan” solution to the TARP fiasco. By compromising his fiscal principles and NOT drawing a line in the sand….he lost the Public.  It was the beginning of the end of his Presidential bid and opened the door for the election of Barrack Obama.
2. The attendance of Republican leadership ( the same leadership that supported the TARP fiasco above) at the recent” Bipartisan” Health Summit at Blair House.  This smoke and mirrors event purported to compare Republican ideas with the dogma of Obama, Pelosi and Reid.  The event confused and misled the public.  By attending the event, Republicans snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in their opposition to the Obama’s use of our health care system to implement socialist reform.

Rather than being mesmerized by the “illusion” of Bipartisanship at Blair House, the GOP leadership should have walked past Blair House, marched to local clinics and hospitals, and listened to doctors, nurses and patients on the front line of health care.  This could have sent a powerful message to every American and delivered a death blow to ObamaCare.  The symbolism could have ended the debate once and for all.  Picture this:  the Democrats sequestered in a government building talking to themselves, versus The GOP hand in hand with The American People.

It should be noted that some Republicans opposed the Blair House meeting and were pushing for a grassroots frontal assault.  Congressman Thad McCotter and a handful of other GOP members advocated for this action.  I believe this approach would have brought victory to all who support Freedom and Liberty.

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Within our own party, we need to make it clear that from now on there will be a price to pay for abandoning conservative principles.  The grassroots – activists from tea parties to town halls – have sent a message: no more ‘fake-it-until-you-make-it’ conservatives.  The days of merely espousing conservative principles and then, once elected, governing or legislating without principle, are over.

At least one senator has already got this message – Arlen Specter.  In early 2009, after years of distressing votes for big government, Specter’s vote for the stimulus bill provoked an outcry among Pennsylvania’s Republican grassroots.  Having barely survived a 2004 primary challenge from principled conservative Pat Toomey, Specter asked me what he could do to mend fences with conservatives.  I said he needed to stand with us against card check (which abolishes the secret ballot on forming unions) and against the cap-and-trade carbon cutting scheme.

He agreed, publicly declaring himself against those proposals – and soon after, he abandoned the party and became a Democrat.

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Interesting story at Politico. Having been involved with both the tea parties and GOP leadership, color us unsurprised:

While the energy of the anti-tax and anti-big government Tea Party movement may yet haunt Democrats in 2010, the first order of business appears to be remaking the Republican Party.

Whether it’s the loose confederation of Washington-oriented groups that have played an organizational role or the state-level activists who are channeling grass roots anger into action back home, Tea Party forces are confronting the Republican establishment by backing insurgent conservatives and generating their own candidates—even if it means taking on GOP incumbents

Read the whole thing here.