Tea Party Victory in Utah

HotAir is reporting the defeat of Senator Bob Bennett of Utah in his quest to be re-nominated by the Republican party as a victory for the Tea Party. Bennett came in third at the party convention and because the top candidate did not garner 60%, there will be a Republican primary. Certainly, he had not made Tea Partyers happy with his support for TARP bailouts. From a pre-convention article in the Christian Science Monitor, on his possible ouster:

Though Bennett has well-established conservative credentials (he supports gun rights and favors tighter immigration controls), many tea partyers, as well as the antitax group the Club for Growth that is campaigning against Bennett, cite his 2008 vote in favor of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bank bailout as the thing that put him on the wrong side of their movement.

Bennett also got in the cross hairs of the Club for Growth, an organization that some in the Tea Party movement seem to distrust over immigration issues. (Welcome to politics, neophytes, where you might find your bedfellows to be strange.) Also from the same pre-convention article:

"There are a lot of unhappy delegates," says Kirkham, who, like about 70 percent of the delegates this year, will attend the convention for the first time. Many of the newcomers have been chosen by their neighborhood precincts specifically for their anti-Bennett stance, he says, as well as their tea party credentials. According to a Salt Lake Tribune poll, 68 percent of delegates say they are tea party supporters.

This is great news, for the Tea Party. Putting the fiscally irresponsible on notice that there is a price to be paid for spending other people's money is the only way we will make progress in digging out of the hole that Obama and to a lesser extent George Bush, have put us in.

But there is much hard work ahead. Bennett may launch an independent bid, like Charlie Crist in Florida. Exit question, if dumping fiscally liberal Republicans results in the election of fiscally liberal Democrats, are we making forward progress?