Toomey

HARRISBURG — Pat Toomey has the GOP's endorsement in Pennsylvania's race for U.S. Senate and spent a decade in Washington, yet he has avoided any Tea Party-style challenge and even the dreaded label of Washington "insider."

That could be because he's getting credit from some quarters for helping give life to the movement of small-government conservatives that has drawn considerable fuel from the Tea Party, patriot and 9/12 groups.

Former House majority leader Dick Armey, a GOP operative who doubles as a face of the Tea Party, told attendees at a Philadelphia event last week that Toomey's challenge from the right to moderate Sen. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania's 2004 GOP primary was a defining moment for that movement.

"Its moment of conception was six years ago when the Republican President George W. Bush endorsed Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey," Armey told people in a video from the book signing and meet-and-greet that was posted on a Philadelphia Inquirer political blog. "Why isn't the president embracing Pat Toomey?"

Toomey, who was a third-term congressman at the time, narrowly lost the primary.

But Bush's embrace of Specter signaled the moment when small-government conservatives split from the Bush-led GOP, said Adam Brandon, a spokesman for Armey's Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, FreedomWorks.

Toomey is opposed by Democrat Joe Sestak in the hotly contested race to replace Specter, whom Sestak beat in the Democratic primary. It was the prospect of a brutal primary rematch with Toomey that prompted the fifth-term Specter to flee to the Democratic Party. But Sestak beat him by, in part, positioning himself as a trustworthy liberal.

Sestak, a second-term congressman from suburban Philadelphia who spent 31 years in the Navy and retired as a rear admiral, has played up Toomey's kinship with the Tea Party and his vote for Bush-era initiatives that contributed to deficits.

As Tea Party-backed candidates in other states have knocked off Republican Party-establishment candidates for U.S. Senate — Mike Castle in Delaware, Bob Bennett in Utah, Lisa Murkowski in Alaska, Trey Grayson in Kentucky, Jane Norton in Colorado and Sue Lowden in Nevada — the competing threads seem to have unified behind Toomey.

He is backed by Armey's FreedomWorks, the Club for Growth and the Tea Party Express, a group formed by a longtime California GOP consultant, all of which have helped propel outsiders to victory.

State GOP chairman, Robert Gleason, suggests that Pennsylvania has had relative peace because the state GOP has a strong organization, is well-funded and has reached out to Tea Party groups.