Civil War Battle Explains 2013 Elections

With Gov. Chris Christie's massive reelection victory in the blue territory of New Jersey and Ken Cuccinelli's embarrassing defeat to Terry McAuliffe in the governor's race in often-red (in the off-years) Virginia, reasonable Republicans scored points against the party's renegades in the GOP's ongoing civil war. This internal battle has intensified since the government shutdown, as diehards led by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) have insisted the Republican Party's fortunes are tied to no-compromise conservatism and ideological confrontation, and establishment Rs have decried their party's Kamikaze Club and contended the GOP must maintain a lifeline to the center and political reality.

Yet in the two big statewide races of Election Day 2013, the results favored those who don't fancy hostage-taking. (In Alabama, a tea party birther was defeated by a Chamber of Commerce-backed candidate in a Republican primary for a vacant House seat.) Christie, who drew the ire of hardcore conservatives by refusing to treat President Barack Obama as the devil incarnate, coasted to an easy triumph and earned the right to declare this message: Republican success in the real world comes when GOP candidates emphasize pragmatic governing not ideological crusades. And Cuccinelli, a fierce social conservative with plenty of name recognition as the current state attorney general, was the poster boy for those right-wingers who assert that their party must stick to the far right lane to win elections and transform the nation. His defeat at the hands of a Democrat tainted by assorted money-and-politics scandals—in an election shaped by the government shutdown and Cuccinelli's hard-right views on abortion, birth control, and divorce—will be joyously cited by those who cry bunk in the face of Cruzism. But the non-Cruzers ought to resist the urge to celebrate too much, for the Republican Party may have just experienced its own version of the Battle of Chancellorsville.

This critical Civil War engagement transpired in the spring of 1863 in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. General Robert E. Lee led a Southern force against Major General Joseph Hooker's Army of the Potomac, which had twice as many soldiers as Lee's army. Lee mounted a bold attack and pulled off a decisive win for the South. It was perhaps his greatest feat of the war. But there was a downside (in addition to the friendly-fire battlefield death of Stonewall Jackson): Lee saw his army's success at Chancellorsville as proof his army could do almost anything. He moved his troops north to mount an offensive campaign in Maryland and Pennsylvania.

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