Yes, Virginia, the GOP Establishment did stick a shiv in Ken Cuccinelli
By Matthew Vadum
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.
