What if you were responsible for raising money for your party's candidates, and instead you were raising money to defeat them?
Meet Ted "Treason" Cruz.
Cruz’s profile has elevated in recent weeks with his aggressive campaign against the president’s health care law, including an expensive and profitable anti-Obamacare fundraising spot for the Senate Conservatives Fund that has aired nationwide. But his position with the NRSC as vice chairman for grass-roots outreach — which these sources said never was clearly defined in the first place — seems in tension with his work with the SCF. And his lack of involvement at the NRSC raises the question of why he would want to be affiliated with the group at all.
“The vice chairman of the NRSC is actively raising money for an organization going after Republican senators,” one GOP aide bluntly observed.
This explains Reince Priebus's anodyne infomercial at Redstate. It explains the widening chasm between the grenade brigade and the old-timers in the GOP Senate caucus. It's just like the first time the GOP opened
Pandora's jar in 2010; they got the Tea Party, and a snootful of intransigent reactionaries. Ted, one of those who benefitted from that misstep, beat the establishment David Dewhurst in the primaries. So the GOP, before he'd even hit the Senate, gave him the Vice-Chairmanship of the NRSC. That was a blatantly obvious attempt at co-option; instead, it now looks like a jaw-droppingly stupid move. The battle that's raging right now certainly has important governing implications; but it might just as easily be seen as a belated attempt to stuff Ted back in the jar.
Unfortunately for the GOP -- and the country-- that's where the metaphor breaks down.