The tea party choice is a new strand of Republican civil war. Tea party eats its own in Oklahoma

TULSA, Okla. — Down here in the buckle of the Bible Belt, conservatives might eat one of their own.

Tea party celebrities Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee descended here on Thursday night to anoint their candidate to replace retiring Republican Sen. Tom Coburn: Republican former state House Speaker T.W. Shannon.


By embracing Shannon, they are leaving behind Rep. James Lankford, the fifth-highest-ranking member of the House GOP leadership, who is also bidding for the last two years of Coburn’s term. Lankford could be forgiven for thinking he had a shot at such prominent endorsements, since he rode the tea party wave of 2010 to a seat in the House. But the conservative glitterati think Shannon is a true believer and that Lankford has disappointed them by voting to raise the debt ceiling and joining Speaker John Boehner’s team.

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It’s a new strand of Republican civil war: not the typical insurgent-versus-establishment story in the Sooner State, but a battle on the right for the deepest conservative bona fides. And if Shannon pulls off an upset over Lankford, it would send a message to Republicans: Watch out, the tea party can still shake up a primary.

“These are our warriors in the United States Senate,” Palin said at a “Liberty Rally” for Shannon, pointing to Cruz and Lee. “We’ve got to send them some reinforcements. And Oklahoma’s contribution to that worthy effort is T.W. Shannon.”

“You can tell a lot about a man by the friends he keeps. What do you think of my friends?” Shannon, flanked by his new allies, said to 15 seconds of applause from the hundreds in the audience.

The backing of his new pals certainly isn’t hurting. A poll this week for a Shannon-aligned group showed him with a lead for the first time in the race.

“We clearly have the momentum,” said a beaming 36-year-old Shannon during a pre-rally interview.

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As he rocked back and forth in his chair, the state’s first African-American speaker and a member of the powerful Chickasaw Nation basked in the moment: Two hours before the biggest speech of his career, he was up in the polls and Sens. Cruz (Texas) and Lee (Utah) — two men central to the first government shutdown in 17 years — had just arrived in the green room.

“People counted us out. People came to me when I was first running and said: Why are you even doing this?’” Shannon said of his 45-point turnaround in two months.

The election of the biracial Shannon would deliver the national GOP a major image boost and a rebuttal to the party’s struggles with minorities and youth, marking the first time two black Republican senators served simultaneously.

“Instant celebrity,” said former Republican Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating.

“The Democrats accuse us of not embracing diversity? Oh, my goodness. He is it. He is the whole package. Oklahoma, you’ve been so lucky to have him,” Palin said at the rally, seconds after cracking to awkward laughs: “I still can’t pronounce his name. Ta-herer-wuhn. So I’m glad you go by T.W.” (His full name is Tahrohon Wayne Shannon.)

And though no mention was made at the rally of Lankford, there were several veiled attacks on the sophomore lawmaker’s ties to Washington. Palin said she’s “not afraid of going on a little RINO hunt,” while Cruz was more direct, casting Shannon as an ally in the combative Senate Republican lunches that the Texas senator has joked require a food taster, lest an enemy poison him.

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“I am supporting T.W. Shannon because he has the courage of his convictions to look the party bosses in the eye and say: ‘I don’t work for you. I work for the people in Oklahoma,’” Cruz said at the rally, where Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid was used as a bogeyman to deafening boos and repealing Obamacare was presented as a real possibility.

A few hours earlier and a few miles up the road in Bartlesville, where oil derricks dot sprawling cattle ranches, Lankford took questions from several dozen Republicans about Benghazi, Fast & Furious and government fraud in a far more subdued atmosphere.

Lankford recounted his continued battles with the Obama administration and his efforts to combat welfare fraud but warned against “celebrities” who go to Washington to pose for the cameras instead of delving into the issues — a shot at those backing Shannon.

Lankford wants to gut Obamacare but said the best way to make progress is “four yards and a cloud of dust,” not always Hail Mary passes. He told one attendee that while he had issues with the IRS, abolishing it was not realistic. And his biggest applause lines came after he celebrated Attorney General Eric Holder’s cancellation of an Oklahoma event on Thursday — and when he pitted his battles as ones against Democrats, not Republicans.

“I am not running against T.W. and Randy [Brogdon],” Lankford said. “I’m running against Harry Reid.”

Brogdon, a former state senator also running for Coburn’s seat, is polling at 7 percent, compared to 42 percent for Shannon and 32 percent for Lankford, evaporating a huge lead for Lankford in February after a TV ad barrage from Shannon and his allies, according to a Wednesday poll by the GOP firm Public Opinion Strategies.

Still, 16 percent of those surveyed remain undecided in the Senate race, and no one is counting out Lankford, who triumphed as an underdog in 2010 by winning his Oklahoma City House district as a political novice and Baptist youth leader. Lankford insisted that his own polling has him up.

Republicans here expect a nail-biter and a likely August runoff if neither of the two leading candidates can clear 50 percent in the June 24 primary. But Oklahomans also believe Lankford needs to respond quickly to pro-Shannon spending. Lankford said a raft of positive ads would drop in a matter of days.

“It’s pretty remarkable to see the margin close this rapidly and the lead apparently change hands. The other side can’t afford to leave that unanswered, and I expect the counter-stroke soon. … I want to see what the quality of the response is from the [Lankford] team,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). Cole is publicly neutral, but Shannon once worked for him as a staffer.

The fierce GOP primary is causing a conflict of interest for many Oklahoma Republicans — and attendees at Shannon’s rally differed on who exactly represents the establishment that Shannon and his allies rail against.

Michelle Wise was cutting a $50 check to Shannon, praising him as a “constitutional conservative” and calling Lankford “more of an establishment” politician. A few feet away, Roberta Pfanstiel disagreed. She supports Shannon’s Senate run but wishes Lankford would stay in his House seat.

“I like James Lankford,” she said. Asked if he represents the establishment, she gestured to the grand stage where Shannon, Lee, Cruz and Palin spoke: “They’d like to label him that way.”

Things are no less muddled in the top tiers of state politics, where senior officials including Gov. Mary Fallin are staying out of the race. So is the entire congressional delegation.

There is clearly local unease that outsiders have descended on Oklahoma to airlift Shannon into the Senate. They include FreedomWorks and the Senate Conservatives Fund and national GOP figures like Palin, Lee, Cruz, Ben Carson and RedState’s Erick Erickson.

“It is a focus to try to nationalize the race,” Lankford said. “Oklahomans determine their race; they want to know what their neighbors think, their family thinks.”

“Those outside groups probably don’t even know the difference between a Hereford and a heifer,” said Oklahoma Republican Party Chairman Dave Weston, educating a reporter on the contrast between a cattle breed and a young female cow. “Groups that come in here that don’t understand those items shouldn’t be trying to label what Oklahoma is and what it’s going to be.”

“We are a state that believes in individual rights, individual responsibilities and individual decisions,” said Pam Pollard, a former state GOP vice chairwoman and current president of the Oklahoma Federation of Republican Women. “Having a lot of people come out and endorse and state their public opinion? Oklahomans want to leave that up to the voters.”

Lee said backing Shannon is about shoring up the ranks of reform-seeking conservatives in the Senate, where members like Lee and Cruz often disagree with their colleagues on strategy, such as tying defunding Obamacare to a government shutdown.

“He’s a reformer and Tom Coburn is a reformer, and in that respect there would be some similarities there. He’s someone who’s willing to challenge the status quo,” Lee said in an interview, refusing to criticize Lankford. “This isn’t about any other candidate. This is about T.W. Shannon. I saw in T.W. Shannon an extraordinary candidate.”

A deep-voiced 46-year-old with a shock of red hair, Lankford is one of his party’s top communicators and an occasional deal maker, helping grease his party’s right flank to pass a new highway law in 2012. He’s received endorsements from former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) to pair with his generally conservative voting record, but Lankford is drawing criticism for votes to lift the debt ceiling, his positions on immigration and, in particular, his ties to Washington power circles.

Lankford called it “absurd” to pillory him for joining House leadership.

“When you say, ‘Oh gosh, he made leadership, so that’s a problem,’ it smacks almost to me as …. go to Congress, but don’t lead. I mean go, but don’t actually be a leader,” he said. “It’s absurd.”

While Lankford said the shutdown didn’t “solve anything,” Shannon said Obamacare funding is where the line needed to be drawn and praised Cruz and Lee’s pitched battle to defund Obamacare by tying it to government funding.

“There are worse things than a government shutdown,” he said.

At least the two men can agree on something: Neither committed to supporting Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) as minority leader, provided McConnell wins his own reelection race, while Brogdon says McConnell needs to resign because he’s the “antithesis of everything” the former state senator believes in.

Brogdon said Lee and Cruz would likely be disappointed by Shannon in Washington, predicting he would follow McConnell’s lead.

“I don’t think T.W. Shannon is going to be in their corner when the fight really starts. That’s not who he is. That’s who I am,” said Brogdon, who pulled nearly 40 percent of the vote in the 2010 gubernatorial primary.

Interviews with top Oklahoma GOP officials and strategists reveal little daylight ideologically between the two men seen as key cogs in Oklahoma’s Republican machinery — though Lankford seems to stress the art of the possible more than Shannon. Even social issues offer little contrast: Both emphasize their deep ties to the religious community, with Shannon’s wife, in campaign videos, praising his faith, and Lankford’s website inviting supporters to pray for the nation — and pick up a lawn sign.

The blessing of the immensely popular Coburn is another matter, and he remains publicly neutral. A source familiar with Oklahoma Republican politics wondered how to square Shannon’s associations with Cruz and Lee, who disagreed sharply with Coburn over the shutdown last fall, and his past with Cole, a close Boehner ally.

“Why is he so closely aligned with Tom Cole, who’s about as establishment as it gets?” the source asked of Shannon. And “does he share the same view with the rally-goers that Tom Coburn is insufficiently conservative?”

Shannon responded that Coburn has laid the “blueprint” for modern conservatism, likening him to a prophet for his warnings about debt and overspending. “There’s no question” that Coburn is conservative despite disagreements with Cruz, Shannon said.