What did tea partiers accomplish in NY-23?

That’s the topic of my column this week with Ben Boychuk. To recap: “tea party” conservatives in that New York congressional district managed to drive a moderate Republican out of the race — and ended up handing the seat to a Democrat in a district that has long sent the GOP to congress. As I write in the column, we’ve seen this story before:

For a good idea of what tea party activism might accomplish, take a good look at Kansas.

It’s about as Republican a state as they come. It last went for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964. And the GOP has 300,000 more registered voters than its Democratic rivals. But the state’s governor is a Democrat. So is the attorney general.

How in the heck did that happen? Easy. The Republican Party in Kansas tore itself in two, between center-right “moderates” and conservative true believers. The infighting has been going on for more than a decade, leaving voters alienated and giving Democrats opportunities for electoral wins in a state they have no business contesting.

That looks similar to events in New York. The district there had sent moderate Republicans to Congress forever — its last congressman, John McHugh , crossed party lines to work as President Obama’s Secretary of the Army. But when the GOP establishment picked a similarly centrist Republican to run for office, the tea party folks rebelled and backed a different candidate. Who lost.

The tea party movement started as the biggest expression of sore loserdom in America’s recent political history. George W. Bush had expanded “socialized medicine” — in the form of the new Medicare drug benefit — and turned a budget surplus into a deep deficit. Yet the tea partiers only took to the streets when a Democrat was elected president. It’s not difficult to figure out what motivated them.

So the fact that tea partiers are now holding Republicans to account is refreshing. But parties that insist on ideological purity are usually losers at the ballot box; Democrats began their recent comeback when centrists like Sens. Jim Webb and Bob Casey joined their cause. Tea partiers should heed the lesson if they want to win.

The end of an era in Emporia

About a decade ago, I was the city editor at the Emporia Gazette in Kansas. A couple of great years working at a historic paper. (I was lucky: The Gazette was the first newspaper I remembered growing up.) I didn’t realize — until NBC ran this story — that they’ve shut down their printing press. Scott Thomas, the lead press guy, worked at the Gazette about as long as I’ve been alive. He doesn’t have a job anymore.

This is not a case of the MSM imploding because of its liberal sensibilities, though I suppose a few people in Emporia might argue. Chris and Ashley Walker, the publishers, are good people. These stories are common, and getting more so every day. It’s necessary — the world and technology move on, after all — but it can be painful to experience and witness at times.

The death of George Tiller

I grew up and spent most of my adult life in Kansas. The shooting death of abortion Doctor George Tiller stuns me, but it doesn’t really surprise me, unfortunately. Tiller had been a signal feature of my home state’s political landscape for as long as I can remember — a person around whom political careers were sometimes made or broken — and I can only assume angry recriminations will be echoing in the Statehouse and at the polls for a little while to come.

I do not believe that one crazed gunman represents the whole of the pro-life movement — unlike Andrew Sullivan, I’m not tempted to pin this on Bill O’Reilly. But I also note that no doctor or pharmacist ever gets shot for refusing to perform an abortion or denying women access to birth control pills.