Todd's Mischief Blog

Yesterday , the right wing media was abuzz with the story of Deb Fischer, the Tea Party David who took down the establishment GOP's Goliath, Jon Bruning. So why would Nebraska Senator Mike Johanns take issue with that? “She's not going to get tangled up in Tea Party and everything else,” Johanns told the Omaha World Herald. “I just think she's going to be a very common-sense, practical conservative, and we need more of that here.” Conventional wisdom would say that Johanns isn't even making sense. How can the Tea Party candidate not get "tangled up" in the Tea Party? What is he talking about? Johanns is talking about reality. What's being billed as a Tea Party victory has almost nothing to do with the Tea Party. I'm not going to make many friends among those who claim victory after-the-fact, but the simple truth is that no Nebraska Tea Party groups made any official endorsements in the primary election. I don't doubt that there were many Tea Party...

On Monday, I lamented that Sarah Palin and Breitbart.com were dabbling in local Nebraska politics that they didn’t fully understand. The day after I wrote that, Herman Cain—who hasn’t lived in Nebraska for decades—seconded that endorsement. Last night, for better or worse, they and others got their wish as dark horse Deb Fischer beat favorite Jon Bruning in the Nebraska Republican senate primary. (Full disclosure: I volunteered for the Bruning campaign.) It’s impossible to gauge by any objective measure how much influence their endorsements had on that outcome, but as one on the ground, I am inclined to say it was more than a little. There is just one thing I want to reemphasize before moving on and moving forward, that this was a primary contest among conservatives all around. In spite of certain characterizations, there was no “establishment” candidate in the race and certainly no RINO. I say this only because I hate to see a good and solid conservative’s reputation tarnished just t...

What was, just one week ago, a fairly tame US Senate primary in Nebraska with a young and popular conservative Attorney General holding a comfortable lead has now become a neck-and-neck race for the finish as the candidates try to “out-conservative” one another. Last Wednesday, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin made a late endorsement in the Nebraska GOP Senate primary for Deb Fischer, previously in a distant third place. Now today Breitbart.com is running the story--billed as EXCLUSIVE--that calls Jon Bruning “establishment” in the lead. Alaska might rhyme with Nebraska, but that doesn’t make Sarah Palin an expert on our politics. And Brietbart.com is so intimately familiar with the Cornhusker State that in a March story about the lawsuit against ObamaCare, they made Bruning the AG of South Dakota! As Maxwell Smart would say, “missed it by that much.” What Palin and Breitbart are doing is putting an underline beneath the old adage, all politics are local--or at least they should be....