Official Washington is in near meltdown over Christine O’Donnell’s victory in the Delaware Republican primary. Senior Republicans are apoplectic that they will (in their view) fail to gain the Delaware seat and therefore cannot win control of the Senate (which was a long shot in any case).
There’s a glut of commentary and assumptions about the Tea Party and much of it is wrong. Here are some common mistakes:
1. The Tea Party will fade away. Christine O’Donnell’s victory confirms that it is a major electoral force. Many of those involved have not voted before. The movement is growing, not shrinking.
2. It will damage the Republican party. If the Republican party can harness its power, the electoral benefits could be huge. So far, the party hierarchy is being condescending and dismissive. But even if this continues, Republicans will benefit in November from the energy and excitement that the Tea Party is generating.
3. The Tea Party is racist. This charge is based on little more than a few signs that have appeared at some rallies (How many offensive signs are there an anti-war rallies? Many more than you can see at a Tea Party event) and some overheated statements by individuals. It’s essentially a Left-wing smear against the movement and it has failed.
4. Tea Party nominees are too extreme and will be defeated by Democrats in November. In isolated cases – including O’Donnell’s – this might be true. But Democrats are delusional is they think that a split on the right will save them in the mid-terms. For every Democrat who survives in this way, three or four will be swept away. And look at the polls in places like Kentucky and Florida where Rand Paul and Marco Rubio – until recently branded as unelectable – look like they’re on course for comfortable victories.
5. The Tea Party is part of the Republican party. It’s not. Tea partiers are conservatives but they have little interest in simply achieving a Republican Congress. Its ambitions are much bigger than that.
6. The Tea Party cannot elect a President. Until very recently, this seemed like a given. It now seems there is every chance that a Tea Party candidate – Sarah Palin? – can win the GOP nomination in 2012. And with the state the country’s in and the sinking popularity of President Barack Obama, theres every possibility that whoever the Republicans nominate will win.
7. The Tea Party can be told what to do. Republican leaders are finding out that this is simply not the case.
8. The Tea Party is full of loonies who believe masturbation is evil and dinosaur bones are fake. We’ll see a lot of citations of the “nutty” (K.Rove) opinions of Tea partiers – especially, for the next few days at least, by O’Donnell. But the broader Tea Party has little concern about social issues. It is primarily a low-tax, small-government movement.
9. The rise of the Tea Party shows that America is disintegrating. That’s certainly what you might think if you read all the liberal commentary about the Tea Party. But all this really illustrates is how the American elites have failed to grasp what is happening.
10. The Tea Party is an angry reaction to Obama’s 2008 victory, which was a true realignment of US politics. There was no political realignment in 2008. Obama won because he was anti-Bush and the country was in the mood for a complete change. It was not a mandate for increasing the national debt and growing government. While the Tea Party opposes Obama and all he stands for, it is not especially focussed on him personally. In fact, Congress – Democrats and Republicans – seems more unpopular than Obama among Tea partiers.
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