TIME: "Conservatives Rip Virginia GOP Effort, But Kept Their Wallets Stowed"
GOP hacks have been leaking this argument to the media, and several reporters have gone with it — i.e., the tea party groups didn't give money to the Cuccinelli campaign effort in Virginia. Actually, many conservative groups and individual did give significant sums of money. But even that is not the point.
The fact is that the tea party movement is made up of millions of people and thousands of groups. Most of them are not organized under PACs, etc. We are talking about volunteers, people meeting at homes and restaurants, acting mostly independent of each other. It is not a monolithic institution like the RNC and the other Washington-based organizations. Nor is it, in the aggregate, a political party. Moreover, at the rallies I attended for Cuccinelli, tea party activists were everywhere. They donated not only their money but their time. The GOP bureaucracy had a duty to support Cuccinelli. It raises funds for the purpose of funding and electing Republicans. But it abandoned Cuccinelli, a Reagan conservative and successful Virginia attorney general. It wrote him off. And this was done to promote the establishment-wing of the GOP, as I have written and explained in the past.
So, the GOP leadership can plant all the stories it wants with its media friends. But it doesn't change the facts. (By the way, I didn't see Karl Rove at any of the rallies I attended. Why not?)
