The invaluable Tim Carney, now a Washington Examiner senior political columnist, has a piece today on the divide between the Tea Parties and the K Street faction of the GOP. It’s a narrative I’m skeptical of — who’s to say a Tea Partier today won’t be a lobbyist lapdog tomorrow? — but Carney includes plenty of data that illustrate the primary-season divide:

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.

Kentucky shows an even starker contrast. Before the May 18 Senate primary, secretary of state and McConnell acolyte Trey Grayson had raised a half million dollars from PACs —20 times the PAC haul of upstart Rand Paul. Paul got a check from outgoing curmudgeon Sen. Jim Bunning, but 18 Republican senators bankrolled Grayson’s campaign, plus the Republican Mainstreet Partnership and three top House Republicans.

Paul should turn out well, but what about the rest? Surprisingly, Kentucky wasn’t the only place where the Tea Party candidate was also the less militaristic Republican — the Colorado, too, K Street candidate Jane Norton attempted to paint her rival, Ken Buck, as soft on terror. Other Tea Party contenders don’t seem to differ much in foreign policy from their establishment opponents, but it’ll be interesting to see if any kind of group mentality forms among the (relative) outsiders who win this November. Political change isn’t always direct; sometimes alliances made on one set of issues translate into policy alterations on other fronts.

Still, we’ve seen Republican revolutionaries turn into K Street kittens before — not only in the years following the GOP’s 1994 takeover of Congress, but also much earlier when the grassroots Goldwaterites and young, idealistic YAFers learned how much money they could make by playing within the system. Carney’s exactly right when he says, “You can see today, by their improved personal financial situations, what Lott and Dole were trying to accomplish in Washington.” Unfortunately, what’s true of Lott and Dole is true of the leaders of pretty much every “conservative” organization in this town, as the Bush years demonstrated.