How Mitch McConnell crushed the tea party

cnn

excerpts

• Bringing a grassroots-groomed outsider into his day-to-day political circle smacked of craven opportunism, a blatant attempt to neutralize his right flank. But the move was vintage McConnell: Throughout his career, he has cared first and foremost about winning, elite opinion be damned.
• National conservative groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund, FreedomWorks and the Madison Project were endorsing McConnell's primary challenger throughout last fall and winter, but with Paul in McConnell's corner, their arguments lacked punch.
• At an April town hall in Edmonton, a constituent asked him why he endorsed McConnell. Paul said he would speak to her in private. He was asked the same question by radio host Glenn Beck during a trip to Texas in February. Paul tried to evade the answer, saying he was in town to endorse a local candidate.
• They wasted little time putting it into effect. On the very week Bevin announced his campaign, the McConnell campaign unleashed a punishing television ad blasting the upstart challenger for taking state "bailout" funds to help repair a Connecticut-based factory he owned.
• The Senate Conservatives Fund stopped running pro-Bevin TV ads earlier this month. And notably, big-name conservatives like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin stayed out of the race.
• It wasn't tactics alone that saved McConnell. The power of incumbency and his deep relationships in Republican politics made him almost impossible to topple.
• "I thought that this cycle it was important for us to make sure that in the real election, which is in November, we had people who could actually win," McConnell said. "Winners make policy. Losers go home."

comment:

Cornball Cornyn won and now this guy wins.  Nothing will change.  Money rules the roost and the people are sheep.  That's what I got out of this article.