A message was sent to both the Republican and Democrat parties yesterday at polling stations across America, especially on the east coast. The perennially blue New Jersey now has a Republican Governor-elect. In Virginia, Republicans swept the top three spots in state office with Bob McDonnell winning that state’s gubernatorial race. Virginia was the coveted swing state last time around, a state that Keith Olberman cited as an example of permanent change. Interestingly enough, in exit poll questions asking voters why they chose the folks they chose were answered with one word: “change.”

New York’s hotly contested 23rd district was of epic soap opera proportions, a problem which is the direct result of party loyalists inability to see past their own navels. On October 16th I launched DumpDede.com and together with Bill Hennessy, held a last-minute presser (drive-bys and party hacks ignored that it was given on six hours’ notice and tried to use the crowd size as a way to neutralize the scope and power of the movement) and called on the GOP to dump the RINOs and support conservative Doug Hoffman. I heard “politics is local.” Absolutely – and when it is a federal congressional seat, a seat with a vote that could be the tiebreaker on legislation that could affect us all, the boundaries that separate districts and states fade away.

If you insert “conservatism” whenever you hear Doug Hoffman’s name, you get the point.

That’s not what the race was about.

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Congressional Candidate, and Big Government Contributor, Doug Hoffman took to the New York Post today:

At this time, three months ago, I was wrestling with a decision. A decision as to whether or not to run in a special election to fill the seat vacated by the new secretary of the Army, John McHugh. If you had told me 90 days later I would be penning an op-ed piece for the New York Post, I would have laughed in disbelief. I would have laughed even louder had you told me that I would be receiving endorsement and support from political leaders like Fred Thompson, former Majority Leader Dick Armey, or Sarah Palin. Or appearing on broadcast media with national audiences, as their hosts peppered me with questions about the future of the GOP and our nation. 

You see I’m not a professional politician; I’ve never sought elected office. I grew up poor in Saranac Lake, in the heart of the Adirondacks. My siblings and I were raised in a single-parent household by our mother. We worked to help her pay the mortgage. But, like so many others in this great land, I worked hard, got a good education, did a six-year stint in the military, married, landed a good job with a “big eight” accounting firm and started living the American dream.

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A national coalition of Tea Party activists called Thursday for rallies in several states to announce their dissatisfaction with the Grand Old Party.  In an October 22 press release they state:

We are extremely disappointed that the Republican Party (and leaders like Newt Gingrich) has missed the message of the Tea Parties and continues to take conservative voters for granted. We applaud all courageous statesmen (Fred Thompson, Michelle Bachmann, and Dick Armey) and call on other GOP officials to put America’s values over traditional, often corrupt and morally bankrupt, power structures.

This is nothing new, and it is certainly nothing good.  I am no partisan apologist, mind you, and would not support Ms. Scozzafava.  My first significant political activity was on behalf of Pat Buchanan in the 1992 Republican primary in New Hampshire against a sitting Republican president.  You may remember how that ended: Buchanan lost the primary, and President Bush lost the general election.

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On Thursday, the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition called on the Republican Party to denounce the New York Republican Congressional Committee’s selection of über liberal Dede Scozzafava and their crusade against Doug Hoffman, bona fide conservative, backed by the Conservative Party. Tea party groups, frustrated after carrying the water for a hibernating party only to be ignored and attacked as “divisive” by certain GOP leaders, have demanded that Republicans “put up or shut up” when it comes to conservative leadership.

On Friday, at noon central, myself and fellow St. Louis Tea Party organizer Bill Hennessy will hold a short press conference announcing the reclamation of the Republican party from those moderates who falsely espouse “big tent” philosophies, but have little actual record of drawing in independents, Democrats, Libertarians, minorities, women, and youth – a record like the tea parties possess. The big tent already exists; the limited scope comes from leaders like Newt Gingrich who persist in the belief that Democrat-lite is the only way to win a race. Conservatism, when presented in full strength at the ballot, wins at the ballot. To suggest otherwise is to discount the millions who’ve taken to the streets since February in this new conservative revolution.

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