When the tea party jumped the shark

By Dana Milbank, WashPost, Published: November 1

If Ken Cuccinelli II loses his bid to be the next governor of Virginia on Tuesday, as polls suggest he will, the date of the Republican defeat will be traced back to May 18.

That was the day the commonwealth’s Republican Party took what had been a sure thing and instead allowed the tea party to give the Democrats an opening.

Supporters of Cuccinelli, the state attorney general, had scrapped the GOP gubernatorial primary, which probably would have resulted in the nomination of Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, a mainstream conservative who likely would have cruised to victory.

But Cuccinelli’s supporters forced the party to cut the electorate out of the process, replacing the primary with a convention. There, a smaller number of tea party activists handed the nomination to Cuccinelli, a man so conservative he had supported legislation that would have allowed the banning of the pill and other forms of birth control.

Unfortunately for Republicans, the convention chose not just Cuccinelli but also, as the lieutenant governor nominee, E.W. Jackson, a man who has said that gays are “very sick people” whose “minds are perverted”; who has argued that Planned Parenthood has been worse for blacks than the Ku Klux Klan; and who has also said that non-Christians practice “some sort of false religion.”

(More here.)