My article from the Nov. 7, 2013 issue of American Thinker:

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.”

Even
if we generously give the RNC the benefit of the doubt and assume it
did everything it could to boost Cuccinelli’s chances, there is no
question that there was heavy institutional resistance among GOP
apparatchiks to the mainstream conservative contender’s bid.

Cuccinelli’s
worst enemies were just as likely to be found among Republicans as
Democrats.  There was no shortage of prominent, important Republicans crossing the aisle to endorse Democrat McAuliffe.

Boyd
Marcus, former chief of staff for House Majority Leader Rep. Eric
Cantor (R-Va.), joined the McAuliffe campaign after the gubernatorial
candidacy of his pick, sore loser Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, flamed
out.  Bolling himself petulantly refused to endorse Cuccinelli and
worked hard against him, demoralizing the grassroots and depressing
turnout by badmouthing the nominee on conservative talk radio every
chance he got. 

Other
Republicans who endorsed McAuliffe include Dwight Schar, former RNC
finance chairman; Judy Ford Wason, a GOP strategist who worked for
McDonnell; former state senate president pro tempore John Chichester;
state senator Russ Potts; and former House of Delegates members Vince
Callahan, Katherine Waddell, and Jim Dillard.

Karl
Rove, the corporatist Wile E. Coyote of the political consulting world
who nearly lost George W. Bush the presidency not once, but twice, did nothing to help Cuccinelli.  That’s because the generally useless strategerist and other establishment figures have declared war on the Tea Party.

And
virtually no one defended GOP lieutenant governor candidate E.W.
Jackson when his Democratic opponent, Ralph Northam, viciously slimed him
for his mainstream Christian beliefs.  It is a core tenet of
Christianity that original sin is responsible for a host of maladies in
the world and, unsurprisingly, Jackson, head pastor of a Christian
church in Chesapeake, believes in that doctrine.

But
Northam ran a disgusting TV ad that amounted to an attack on the very
precepts of Christianity itself.  Building on Jackson’s otherwise
unremarkable belief in original sin, Sarelle Holiday, mother of a
disabled child, absurdly accused Jackson of considering her son “a
punishment.”  Northam, who is white, is such a class act that he even refused to shake the hand of Jackson, who is black, during a joint public appearance in Hampton Roads.

Even
before the polls had closed Tuesday, GOP operatives were already armed
with excuses to explain away Cuccinelli’s approaching loss.  The D.C.
echo chamber reverberated with accusations that Cuccinelli was a
woman-hating religious kook and an irresponsible loudmouth.

One
said a “fire-breathing conservative turned populist unable to defend
his positions on birth control” and women’s issues was doomed to
lose.  The RNC, in his view, was right to save its money for “races they
can actually win.”  Of course, a race decided by a mere 2.5 percentage
points is pretty well winnable by definition.

With
Cuccinelli’s totally avoidable loss, Terry McAuliffe, whose lifelong
profession is Clinton operative, will be in position to secure Virginia
for his puppet-mistress, Alinskyite neo-Marxist Hillary Clinton, in the
2016 presidential election.

McAuliffe
is now a safe bet to take over the Democratic Governors Association and
the National Governors Association.  Both perches will give him even
more access to high-dollar donors than he has now. 

Cuccinelli’s
humiliation at the polls gives plenty of ammo to left-wingers.  The
media is already saying Tuesday’s election results show that voters have
repudiated the Tea Party.

This
is abject nonsense.  Cuccinelli was able to almost close a huge gap in
the polls with McAuliffe only by campaigning hard in the final days on
the monstrosity that is ObamaCare and linking the hated wealth- and
health-redistribution program to his opponent.

Also
on Tuesday in Mobile, Alabama, a relative nobody, a Tea Party guy named
Dean Young, with no money and no big fancy political machine behind
him, scored an impressive 47 percent of the vote in a GOP primary runoff
against Bradley Byrne, the well-funded choice of big business, who will
almost certainly win the general election in the ultra-safe Republican
congressional seat.

Of
course, the fact that a Tea Party activist came out of nowhere to
almost score an upset against a pillar of the Republican Party
establishment is nowhere to be found in the New York Times article about the election.

The narrative is always more important than the truth.

Matthew Vadum is an investigative journalist in Washington, D.C., and author of the ACORN/Obama exposé Subversion Inc.  Follow him on Twitter.