Insurgent Republicans: the Club for Growth wants to create a free market GOP, whether the party likes it or not.

• Author: Weigel, David

THIS IS NOT where Pat Toomey wanted to be tonight. The 43-year-old Pennsylvanian took over the Club for Growth in September 2006, after he lost a nail-biting primary to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and vacated his own seat in Congress. Against the objections of powerful Republicans, Toomey helped nudge Stephen Laffey, the conservative mayor of Cranston, Rhode Island, into a primary fight against Lincoln Chafee, the state's liberal Republican senator. Throughout the summer, polls showed Laffey positioned to do what Toomey couldn't: oust a pro-choice, pro-tax R/NO ("Republican in Name Only") and send the GOP establishment reeling.

But the plan isn't coming together. As Toomey quietly eats a late dinner in a D.C. hotel, Andrew Roth, the Club for Growth's government affairs director, feverishly refreshes the website collecting vote results. The first numbers come in, and Laffey is down 56 percent to 44 percent.

"Do we know where those numbers are from?" asks the club's executive director, David Keating. "Are they from his precincts?"

"It looks bad everywhere" Toomey says, putting down a cell phone and returning to his plate. Laffey ends up losing, 54 to 46.

Hopes had been high for the Rhode Island primary. After watching a once-obscure millionaire named Ned Lamont upset Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman in neighboring Connecticut, political junkies were talking up the Laffey-Chafee race as a gladiator match of Republican philosophies and a test of the Club for Growth's power. To its opponents' delight, the club failed the test. The Providence Journal editorialized against the group's "pretty nasty" anti-Chafee ads. The Economist's Lexington columnist welcomed the club's setback, because "the Chafees of this world are good for the health of the Republican Party."

That's certainly the conventional wisdom. The last year has seen a surge in hand-wringing commentary about Washington's partisan trench warfare. Books with tides like Off Center and Fight Club Politics have bemoaned the decline of swing districts and "moderate" candidates. Columnists such as The Washington Post's legendary David Broder have singled out politicians like Chafee and Lieberman for praise, for bucking their parties' trends and for battling liberal bloggers, the Club for Growth, and other ideological insurgents.

In fact, the club was founded with the goal of battling partisanship--not to help the parties get along better but to turn their attention from scandals to policy. The...