While Ken Buck may have earned the endorsement of the National Republican Senatorial Committee following his primary victory on Aug. 10 against Jane Norton (the NRSC had caused a stir earlier in the cycle when it appeared to be backing Norton), it was an earlier endorsement from Sen. Jim DeMint’s Senate Conservatives Fund (SCF) that helped bolster Buck’s conservative, “outsider” credentials.

Norton and Buck exchanged charges of “insider” status throughout the primary–but the involvement of SCF, Club for Growth, and other PACs reveals the proxy war being fought in DC:

The current GOP fault line is not exactly conservatives vs. moderates or new guard vs. old guard. For 2010, the rivalry is the Tea Party wing against the K Street wing. To tell which kind of Republican a candidate is, see how the Democrats attack him: If he’s branded a shill for Wall Street, he’s from the K Street wing. If he’s labeled an extremist outside the mainstream, he’s a Tea Partier. [emphasis added]
More tellingly, study their campaign contributions. K Street Republicans’ coffers are filled by the political action committees of defense contractors, drug companies, lobbying firms, and Wall Street banks. A Tea Party Republican is funded by the Club for Growth or the Senate Conservatives Fund, which is run by the Republican leadership’s least-favorite colleague, Jim DeMint.
In Colorado’s Senate primary last week, the Tea Party trumped K Street as Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck upset former Lt. Gov. Jane Norton. Norton, herself a former lobbyist who tried to run from that background, raised $293,000 from PACs. Buck got only $2,500 in PAC cash.
Buck got zero support from Republican lawmakers’ PACs while 15 GOP incumbents funded Norton, including leaders Mitch McConnell, Lamar Alexander, John Thune and Kay Bailey Hutchison. Two senators who have cashed out to K Street — Mel Martinez and Trent Lott — also put their money behind Norton.

The Club for Growth endorsed Buck on Aug. 18. In winning his primary, Buck also benefited from over $2 million in TV ad buys on his behalf from the group Americans for Job Security.

The New York Times and others on the left have quickly jumped on the “extremist” bandwagon, and media outlets have taken to bundling Colorado’s GOP nominee with Nevada’s Sharron Angle and Kentucky’s Rand Paul in a thin “guilt-by-association” meme conflating each individual candidate’s views as symbolic of Tea Partiers in general.