The candidates "that nobody sent" won last Tuesday

The biggest loser in this week's tumultuous primary elections wasn't Arlen Specter or President Obama or even Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell. It was the clubhouse.

In each of the marquee Senate races, the party establishment took it on the chin. Specter, the Republican-turned-Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, had support from every star in the Democratic firmament but was eclipsed by two-term Rep. Joe Sestak. In Kentucky, Rand Paul, a tea party-caffeinated novice with impassioned and occasionally eccentric views, obliterated Trey Grayson, the choice of McConnell and the state GOP leadership. In Arkansas, Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln was forced into a precarious runoff by Lt. Gov. Bill Halter despite backing from both Obama and former President Clinton.

The ethos of the clubhouse era was captured in the story of Illinois Democrat Abner Mikva, who -- decades before becoming a House member and then a federal judge -- walked into his Chicago Democratic ward office in 1948 as an earnest law student hoping to volunteer. As Mikva later recounted, a glaring ward committee member brusquely asked him, " 'Who sent you?' I said, 'Nobody sent me.' He put [his] cigar back in his mouth and he said, 'We don't want nobody that nobody sent.' "

This week's elections were the triumph of the candidates that nobody sent.