By Robert Stacy McCain on 9.1.10 @ 6:09AM
It's official: Alaska primary gives GOP insurgents a reason to
cheer.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- David Cuddy showed up at Joe Miller's
campaign headquarters Tuesday evening about an hour after Sen. Lisa
Murkowski conceded defeat in the Republican primary. He was greeted
warmly by Miller volunteers who had gathered to celebrate in the
second-floor office next to an insurance agency after a day of
fretfully watching the count of absentee ballots.
Two years ago, Cuddy was one of six GOP primary
challengers to Sen. Ted Stevens, and finished second, with 28
percent of the vote. Stevens went on to lose the November 2008
general election to Democrat Mark Begich by a margin of fewer than
4,000 votes. The winning campaign Joe Miller ran against Murkowski
was in large measure a vindication of Cuddy's anti-establishment
challenge to Stevens. As Cuddy congratulated Miller's team Tuesday
night, he laughed: "Alaska Republicans don't like big government --
who ever dreamed of that?"
Miller's victory was a vindication for a lot of people who
have grown tired of seeing the GOP act as accomplices to the
remorseless expansion of federal power. The campaign succeeded in
large measure because the Tea Party movement has turned
long-simmering conservative discontent with big-government
Republicanism into an organized national force. Ever since the 2008
TARP bailout of Wall Street -- for which Murkowski voted -- more
and more GOP voters have joined the insurgency that helped fuel the
Miller campaign in accomplishing a rare thing: The defeat of an
incumbent senator in a Republican primary.
The crowd gathered in Miller HQ Tuesday could not recall a
recent precedent. True, Utah Republican Sen. Bob Bennett was ousted
by his own party earlier this year, but that was a
caucus/convention process, not a primary election. And Pennsylvania
Sen. Arlen Specter quit the GOP months before he could face
conservative primary challenger Pat Toomey.
Many have credited Sarah Palin's early endorsement with
boosting Miller in their home state, and certainly she helped call
national attention to the anti-establishment candidate. The leaders
of the Tea Party Express say that it was Palin who prompted them to
take a second look at Miller, for whom they spent $500,000 for
campaign ads in the closing weeks of the primary.
Ultimately, however, the key factor in Miller's victory
was the candidate himself. A West Point graduate and veteran of the
1991 Gulf War with a Yale Law degree and a master's degree in
economics, Miller persuasively argued the case against a
continuation of the GOP establishment's "go along to get along"
posture. Tuesday evening, after Murkowski had called it quits,
Miller campaign manager Robert Campbell recalled how he first met
the candidate at a fundraising event.
"I asked him, what do you see as your first responsibility
as a senator?" Campbell said. "And [Miller] said, to determine if
any of the bills in front of me are constitutional."
It was that sort of plain-spoken conservatism that
persuaded Campbell to join the campaign -- he'd never held such a
position before -- and inspired scores of volunteers who served as
the foot soldiers of Miller's victorious army. One of those
volunteer soldiers, a mother of three named Regina, festooned her
four-wheel-drive truck with large Miller-for-Senate signs and
dubbed it the "Joemobile." Tuesday night, Regina was celebrating
with other volunteers at an Anchorage pizza shop called the Moose's
Tooth Pub.
"It's loud here," she shouted into her cell phone. "It's
totally Miller time!"
