The Republicans never seem to hit bottom. Latest in the hit parade of Republican folly is the “theory,”
earnestly advanced by Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute and
promoted in a fury by Peggy Noonan of the
Wall Street Journal, that the 2012 election was stolen from the Republicans by those light-fingered liberals at the IRA. Wick Allison of the
American Conservative does all the leg work of sorting through Stan’s claims, which play fast and loose with
a study Stan and friends did with the impact of sunshine on the growth of the Tea Party, somehow extrapolating from all that radiation a claim that the IRS rained on the Tea Party’s parade—“it may just be that a bureaucracy dominated by liberals picked up on not-so-subtle dog whistles from its political leadership”—casting such a pall on the proceedings that Mitt Romney lost an election that he “should” have won.
Wick picks a few major holes in Stan’s “argument”—pointing out that the Republican vote 2010 and 2012 showed consistent rather than stymied growth, while the Democrats were down in 2010 and up in 2012. As for the IRS, it was focused on 501©(3) non-profits, which aren’t allowed to engage in political activities. The presence, or absence, of 501©(3)s shouldn’t have a partisan effect on an election.
It’s not surprising that Peggy Noonan’s heart should take wings upon reading Stan’s jive:
Think about the sheer political facts of the president’s 2012 victory. The first thing we learned, in the weeks after the voting, was that the Obama campaign was operating with a huge edge in its technological operation—its vast digital capability and sophistication. The second thing we learned, in the past month, is that while the campaign was on, the president’s fiercest foes, in the Tea Party, were being thwarted, diverted and stopped. Technological savvy plus IRS corruption. The president’s victory now looks colder, more sordid, than it did.
In his summing up, Wick has this to say: “Not for the first time in the last few years, Peggy Noonan needs to take a deep breath. And AEI might want to caution Stan Veuger about using his colleagues’ straightforward scholarly work to extrapolate a case that is not there.” For my part, I can only hope that Peggy, and the rest of the Republican Party, don’t listen to Wick’s words of wisdom, and instead maintain this conspiracy-theory mindset. Because if they do, they’ll lose in 2016 as well.
Afterwords
I’ve dealt with previous effusions from “Wacko Peggo,” as I like to call her, here.
