In his Sunday column, the RTD’s Jeff Schapiro slices into Eric Cantor, which is a bit of “thing” these days, though, for Jeff, not nearly as much fun as chopping George Allen into bite-sized pieces.
The House majority leader is out with a television ad that, while slick, is almost information-free. Jeff sees it differently, a case of Cantor playing the role of “victim” to President Obama’s hectoring bully. While I believe this gives the ad far too much credit for both coherence and narrative, it does show something else:
The spot is designed to mobilize primary voters, many of whom are tea partyers and Libertarians increasingly at odds with business-centric, Establishment-type Republicans such as Cantor. For purposes of the primary — it is tantamount to election in the heavily rural, Henrico County-anchored 7th District — Cantor wants these voters to think he’s one of them.
Which will never happen.
But let’s peel the onion a little more:
It is a foregone conclusion that he will retain the seat he first won in 2000. But Cantor needs to win big. Crushing Brat, a college economics professor who has raised $89,000 to Cantor’s $2 million, could silence malcontents within Cantor’s caucus. It will be a lesson to restive Republicans at home that crossing Cantor can be politically fatal. And it will allow Cantor to concentrate on being a big macha — that’s Yiddish for an important person — and becoming a bigger one.
The TV commercial is a component of this. Though his strategists are saying little about it, Cantor apparently is not making a big buy. But the ad is an acknowledgment of his Virginia constituents by a schmooze-challenged guy who confines his contacts with them to carefully staged events. The ad plays to their strongest impulse: a deep distaste for Obama. In carrying Virginia again in 2012, he was clobbered in the 7th District by Mitt Romney, trailing the Republican by 15 percentage points.
There are malcontents within every caucus, on both sides of the aisle. They come with the territory.
Jeff is right when he notes that Cantor needs to blow David Brat out of the water in June in order to stifle (or at least blunt) future primary challenges in his 7th district base. The rumor mill is already churning out possible scenarios for 2016, when some hope Cantor will face a high-profile, well-funded challenger. But that possibility hinges, in part, on this year’s results. Ding the majority leader in the primary, and the big challenge comes. Fail to even scratch his bumpers? That next big thing goes away.
But those are only possibilities. More pressing are the challenges of Cantor’s own making. The machine he sought to build in the district, and perhaps even statewide, has sputtered of late. His forays into local Henrico politics have been disastrous and his allies dalliance with slating has added a new dimension to those older problems.
He needs a big win. Unless he gets it, Cantor will have to spend less time pondering on the gavel currently in John Boehner’s hands and more on the demanding and sometimes fractious folks back home. It’s not where he wants to spend his time, energy or resources.
But over the next two months, he may find that the road to the Speakership runs not through Mr. Boehner’s career plans or even the machinations of the House’s back benchers.
It runs through Short Pump.
