Early this year, when things in America started to go bad for the Democrats — most dramatically with the Republican win in a Senate by-election in Massachusetts — they were able to console themselves with the thought that there was still plenty of time before the mid-terms to turn it around: time for the economy to improve, for Barack Obama to work his rhetorical magic, and for voters to rediscover some of the unpleasant aspects of the Republicans.
But no longer. Mid-term congressional elections are less than seven weeks away, and the GOP is clear favorite to take back control of the House of Representatives — analyst Nate Silver gives them about two chances in three. So all eyes were on this week’s final round of primaries to see if candidate selection could give a late boost to one side or the other in some crucial states.
The news when it came was good for the “tea party”, the radical anti-establishment insurgency within the Republican Party. Tea partier Christine O’Donnell, on the back of an endorsement by Sarah Palin, dispatched long-time congressman Michael Castle to win the senate nomination in Delaware, and another anti-establishment candidate won the nomination for governor of New York. In New Hampshire, after an excruciatingly slow count, the establishment’s Kelly Ayotte narrowly held off a tea party challenger to win endorsement for the seat of retiring Republican senator Judd Gregg.
For the Republicans, tea party victories are very much a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they indicate grassroots enthusiasm of the sort the party badly needs. Mid-term elections attract low turnouts (primaries, of course, lower still), and a committed base is critical for victory. On the other hand, tea party candidates tend to be extremists who provide plenty of ammunition for their opponents and risk hurting the party electorally. As Democrat senator Robert Menendez put it: “The fact that these individuals may play well in an overall Republican universe doesn’t mean they will play well in a general election universe.”
This is the big question for November: will turnout be high enough, and reach far enough into the uncommitted mainstream, for the increasing weirdness of the Republicans to start to outweigh their greater enthusiasm?
The tea party is affecting the GOP in more ways than just candidate selection. By showing the appeal — at least within the activist base — of certain themes, it is dragging more mainstream Republican figures towards the right, and therefore framing the party’s strategy more and more in extremist terms.
Hence Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House and a possible presidential candidate in 2012, earlier this week painted Obama as fundamentally un-American, “outside our comprehension” with his “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior”. This is becoming a common Republican theme, portraying Democrats (and Obama in particular) as outsiders responsible for all the woes of “real America” — what the New York Times calls “a general portrayal of otherness based on his age and ideology, his upbringing and, inescapably, his race”.
American voters have already rejected this approach once, when they decisively elected Obama in 2008 in spite of their country’s tortured racial legacy. But dissatisfaction with the economy and the lower mid-term turnout — plus the absence of the unpopular George W Bush — may well combine to reverse that verdict.
How much that would matter is an open question. An equally dramatic reversal in 1994 did not stop Bill Clinton from comfortably winning re-election two years later. But it did give Republicans control of the House for 12 years, and significant influence on policy that persisted whether or not they held the White House.
If Democrats want to prevent that from happening again, they’re running out of time to do something about it.
We are witnessing the collapse of the United States as a world power. Once the Republicans regain power they will bring back their policies of tax cuts for the rich and unrestrained market deregulation allowing oil companies to to walk away from oil spills scotch free and encouraging Goldman Sachs employees to con widowers and orphans out of their money. The only worse thing about this time around is that half of the republicans will be crackpot nutjobs. I feel sorry for Americans, even the ones who are too ignorant to realise that they are about to vote someone back in who will work to destroy all fairness in their country while simultaneously thinkning that they are ‘strengthening’ it. Most of those people shouldn’t be allowed to hold a drivers license, let alone run the country.
Obama was elected on the promise that he would “do politics differently”.
He tapped into what I think is a great American characteristic, probably born out of the manner in which the Republic began, and that is an intense distrust of government.
Obama, however, has betrayed their aspirations, proving, with his Chicago Democrat roots, to be the most centralised, ‘Washington- knows- best’ President since Jimmy Carter.
The Tea party is a grassroots movement driven by the conviction that Washington is a large part of ‘the problem’.
The Republicans are being transformed also, and you can see Democrats doing their very best to distance themselves from Obama.
Karl Rove called the dame from Delaware “nutty”, so we can safely assume she’s a total fruit loop, even without knowing that she ‘believes’ the world was actually created in 6 days.
The GOP is now being over run by what it has spawned on cable TV, and the non-reality ‘news’ of Fox. Talk about the lunatics escaping to take over the conservatives! According to the NY Times, Karl Rove got slapped by the Tea Party mob for suggesting that Ms O’Donnell may make out in Delaware, but she ain’t Senate material for the wider public. (Remembering that mid-term primaries are usually attended by a handful of the dedicated).
Hitchens has the Tea Party beautifully captured as the aging white honky party who feel alienated and threatened by an America which is no longer all white and just like them. Of course they tend to be pretty uninformed about stuff too, like the well known sign which said “Hands off my Medicare”; some poor Tea Partier didn’t even realise it was a government programme!
It’s almost like the hippy movement for old white honkies with all their ‘we the people’ and happy clappy revolutionary songs.
Makes me a bit nostalgic in very weird of kind of way. And like the hippy movement, this one will pass too, eventually.
Let it be.