I think that the Tea Parties did an excellent job overall at recruitment, given that they were only actively recruiting since mid-2009, and that the Republican party has been around for much longer, and still hasn’t gotten its recruitment act together. Were there missteps? Yes, but there will be missteps with any human endeavor. The lesson the Tea Parties should learn from this should be a) recruit early, recruit often and b) The lesson Reps should learn is that a) you can’t beat something with nothing, and b) this is not an endorsement of the Republican Party’s actions since the Clinton impeachment, it is a restraining order against Dems which, if they’re not careful, may come to extend to the Republicans. I also must ask, what’s so crazy about wanting to phase out Social Security? It is most certainly un-Constitutional, if you subscribe to enumerated powers doctrine (and what conservative wouldn’t?). The Chilean model, which can Constitutionally be implemented at the state level, is superior in every way to that outdated, immensely statist artifact known as Social Security. That is all besides the objection that we should not be forcing our younger, poorer citizens to subsidize the retirement of our seniors, who tend to be wealthier than average. The fact that an idea is at the margins of political thought does not mean that said idea is a bad or poorly thought-out one.

What’s done is done. I would simply like for us to take away the very important lessons that a) we are not voting for policy papers or philosophical positions, but rather, for candidates. Thus, our recruitment has to be on point so that we can find and attract better candidates who encapsulate our views, and that b) we must look at what the candidate actually believes in, has said and has done, not at who the candidate is affiliated with.This time around, we had limited options and mobility, given that the Tea Party movement was (and in many ways still it) an emergent movement. For the amount of time and resources that they dedicated to candidates and candidate recruitment, I think they did an outstanding job, but I know that they can do better for next time. If the Tea Party learns those two things and has the time to implement what they’ve learned, we’ll have a truly formidable force, and not just a foil to big-spending Republicrats.

I still think that, given the time and resource constraints that the Tea Parties had to deal with, they did very well with what they had. I’m not going to stand up and cheer for candidates like Paladino, Maes or O’Donnell, but with a movement as disparate as the Tea Party movement, you’re bound to get some flops. I’ll emphasize that besides refining the ideas of the movement and ensuring that a change in parties doesn’t dilute the message, the best thing that can happen to the TPM is better candidate recruitment within the ranks.

As JSob says, candidates matters.

for a number of reasons:

First, we do have a set of potential candidates who could make for outstanding Senators, namely Jeff Flake and John Shadegg. Both have verifiable, consistent conservative records, even voting against the Bush spending (which to me a better test of conservatism than whether a given Senator opposes the spending agenda of the opposite party). It’s simply a matter of getting one of the two to run.

Kyl has a number of votes that are… problematic, having voted for Medicare Pt D, No Child Left Behind and large parts of the Bush spending, and some of the issues that he put his time and energy into in Congress were also problematic (he was one of the big pushers for the online gambling ban which passed under Bush).

Sure, he’s not the worst guy in Congress (a pretty large chunk of Republicans voted party line on Medicare Pt D and the rest of the repugnant 2000-2008 agenda), but if we can get one of the two I mentioned to run for the seat, it would be a relatively easy swap of a mushy conservative for a rock-ribbed one.

I know about the others and agree with you, but I hadn’t heard anything about Barasso until ObamaCare came along.

but if we could get Shadegg or Flake to run against Kyl (admittedly a big but), especially Shadegg, we could run a stout campaign against Kyl. In my ideal world, Flake would replace McCain when/if he retires, and Kyl would be toppled by Shadegg in a primary.

“Some of them, wont? lose. I wish we could have used the money wasted on that lunatic Hayworth to gain a couple of additional House seats from Arizona.”

If even a tenth of the money that made it into Hayworth’s oleaginous hands had made it to Kelly, he would have won hands down. If a fifth had made it to McClung, we would be watching Grijalva’s concession speech: yes, the Grijalva who crafted the original, single-payer healthcare bill.

As a latecomer to the Paul fan club (I was skittish about some of his father’s views), I think that he was one of our better candidates by far. However, he certainly had some missteps that didn’t help (his comments vis a vis Civil Rights Amendment, Aqua Buddha, etc). I think what helped is that he was not defined by those statements. The extent to which other candidates were defined by these statements seemed to relate to what they had done in life: O’Donnell is the obvious one to pick on, given that she made a career out of playing the part of “clueless conservative” on the talking head circuit. Joe Miller is less easy to explain: on paper, he had a fantastic record (Yalie, West Point grad, Master’s in Econ, etc), but was somehow defined more by some embroglio having to do with online poker. I would like to see what lessons we can take away from Miller, whose characterization is strange given that he did have a record of some accomplisment.

Start by looking at a candidate’s votes on the “big ones”. For me, those are Medicare Pt D, No Child Left Behind, amnesty, McCain-Feingold, TARP, and various other bills passed by Republicans. Very few Republicans voted against all of those, but those that did are probably very reliably conservative.

(Quick note on TARP: I think it was the “right” thing to do, but it certainly is a good baseline for conservatism, and besides, it was repugnant enough from a small-government perspective to require some good soldiers to fall on their swords, regardless.)

That measured the weighted statistical dispersion would be the beginnings to such a measure. It would, however, be problematic to score certain aspects of conservatism: while economic conservatism is relatively easy (any vote which expands government would be a negative value proportional to said expansion, decreasing government would be proportionally positive), social conservatism is more difficult to define, and often comes in conflict with economic conservatism. Moreover, beyond gay marriage, abortion, and possibly pornography, there are no consistently social conservative issues: there’s a tremendous amount of rancor concerning media censorship and standards, gambling, alcohol, and other subjects within social conservative ranks, much less within conservatism as a whole. The conservatism of foreign is impossible to computate: a straightforward measure where increasing military spending is the proxy would not work for obvious reasons, and (particularly with the advent of neo-conservatism and a general embrace of “globalism”) we cannot necessarily measure it based on utility to America, if such a measure were even possible. Such issues make it difficult for me to take ACU’s measures seriously: the scores are simply an arbitrary assigning of points to various policies.