Reagan conservative Ken Cuccinelli lost his bid for the Virginia governorship because the patrician, turf-protecting Republican Party establishment in his state wanted him to lose.

It's really that simple.

Cuccinelli campaign strategist Chris La Civita suggested on election night Tuesday that the federal government's partial shutdown last month may have hurt his candidate in parts of Virginia where many federal employees and contractors live.

He also suggested that Cuccinelli could have won if he had received more money from national GOP sources, which he said dried up as of Oct. 1.

"There are a lot of questions people are going to be asking and that is, was leaving Cuccinelli alone in the first week of October, a smart move?" La Civita said. "We were on our own. Just look at the volume [of ads]."

Cuccinelli lost by a mere 2.5 percentage points in a state that until somewhat recently had been solidly Republican. Even with Cuccinelli's various tactical mistakes (and there were many), it is still very difficult to believe that the GOP machine couldn't have gotten another fifty-odd thousand voters to the polls to support him if it really wanted to.

Predictably, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who won re-election comfortably on Tuesday, refused to lift a finger to help his vulnerable fellow Republican in Virginia. Even with mountains of cash, Christie had no electoral coattails, which is not exactly a resume-builder for a presidential candidate.

This is, of course, the same politician who betrayed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney on at least two occasions. Christie spent his high-profile speech at the Republican National Convention last year talking about himself instead of Romney. He also won President Obama lots of votes by cozying up to him during the Tropical Storm Sandy saga. But his personal popularity didn't do a thing for the rest of the New Jersey GOP slate this week.

What happened to Cuccinelli wasn't some back-room conspiracy shrouded in smoke and euphemisms; it was a conscious, overt effort to do serious damage to a Tea Party standard-bearer.

Virginia Republicans tend to value hierarchy and tradition. Cuccinelli the upstart was punished for his impertinence. Instead of waiting his turn, as the aristocratic gatekeepers of the Virginia GOP demand, Cuccinelli asked his party elders to value merit and good policy proposals over seniority and rank. The powers that be within the Virginia Republican establishment responded by smearing the archetypal conservative as an extremist and trying to squash him.

Remember that the establishment came out hard four years ago for the now-tainted RINOish governor Bob McDonnell, but this year largely left the cash-strapped Cuccinelli to his own devices against the fabulously wealthy Terry McAuliffe, the Democrats' Daddy Warbucks.

According to the Virginia Public Access Project, key GOP fundraising organs lavished funds in the 2009 election cycle on the ethically slippery McDonnell. The Republican Party of Virginia and the Republican National Committee gave McDonnell $2,704,348 and $2,253,500, respectively.

In the 2013 election cycle, the two big political committees were stingy, according to available data. As of Oct. 23, the Republican Party of Virginia had given Cuccinelli $843,085, and the RNC had coughed up a paltry $85,098 for the gubernatorial candidate. (The Republican Governors' Association was not stingy. RGA gave $1,994,312 to McDonnell, who leaves office in disgrace in January, and a healthy $8,066,772 to Cuccinelli.)

But the Republican National Committee is putting the word out that it did everything it could to help Cuccinelli.

The RNC claims that it spent $3 million on the so-called ground game to help Cuccinelli and the rest of the Republican ticket "while building the party's presence in Virginia." The non-Cuccinelli-specific effort included testing a "new precinct-based voter contact model." The RNC gushed that its "Virginia-based staff included four dedicated to Asian-Pacific American engagement, two for African American engagement, and one for Hispanic engagement."

Radio talk show host Mark Levin says the RNC is trying to "punk" conservatives by trying to "to persuade you that the RNC has been vigorously fighting for Cuccinelli's campaign in Virginia. They think you're so stupid that you'll buy this self-serving BS."

-SNIP

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/11/y...l#ixzz2jyyEy0m8
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After this latest stunt by our GOPe overlords.....I am sooooo done with the GOP. The next phone call I get from them they are getting an ear full.