The Tea Party Good or Bad for the Left?
Robert Shrum, the Susan Lucci of American politics, thinks Republicans are shooting themselves in the foot with the Tea Party movement:
The Tea Party will prove to be the best thing that's happened to Barack Obama and the Democrats since, well, Sarah Palin, the media-hyped 2008 vice presidential nominee who turned out to be a bursting bubble, not a lasting bounce, for the McCain campaign. It's fitting that Palin is now the godmother of a movement that has captured the GOP instead of being captured by it. A series of tea-steeped intra-party fratricides has produced unwanted and unabashedly extreme candidates who will kill the Republicans' best hopes for 2010. Democrats will now lose fewer seats; they'll keep the Senate -- and just maybe even the House. The president won't have to struggle with the harshest consequences of a wholesale hostile takeover in Congress.
Shrum's right that in the short term the Tea Party movement will keep Republicans from maximizing their fortunes. But in the long term I'm not convinced this is such good news for the Democrats, or for the country as a whole. Even if the likes of Christine O'Donnell and Sharron Angle lose winnable races this fall, the underlying situation is that the Republican Party as a whole has made a dramatic lurch to the right. A Republican Party without room for Arlen Specter and Mike Castle and Charlie Crist is one that has turned its back on its center.
In the zero-sum logic of politics, this should be good news for the Democrats, right? A Republican shift to the right leaves room for the Democrats to occupy the center, thus expanding its base and winning more elections. In the end, the Democrats become the 'big tent party' and the Republicans keep shrinking.
A nice thought, perhaps, but unlikely. Someday, perhaps sooner than we realize, a Republican will again occupy the White House. Republicans will again likely control both chambers of Congress. Republicans will set the national agenda, write the laws, appoint the judges, and execute American foreign policy. As a liberal Democrat myself, I find this prospect decidedly unappealing. But the pragmatist in me wishes that if Republicans must gain political power again, I'd rather that the party at least be governed by its rational, moderate wing.
Rational and moderate certainly don't describe the lunatic Tea Party, nor would it describe the movement's alarming xenophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry. Despite his horrific foreign policy, idiotic fealty toward fiscal conservatism and socially backward policies, President Bush at least managed to have a reasonable position on immigration and pay lip service to the virtues of multi-culturalism. The current batch of Tea Party politicians poised to assume power in the Republican Party make Bush look like Paul Wellstone by comparison.
Christine O'Donnell will probably not become Delaware's junior Senator this fall, but her victory in the primary election does not augur well for the country as a whole, including the Democrats.
September 20th, 2010 - 00:15
If it were a movie, I would want these Tea Partiers to gain control. It would be amusing if they got elected and realized, “Holy crap, we have to run a government now?” Of course, it is not a movie and having a rapidly increasing group of morons in there isn’t entertaining.
Also, even if this movement might help Democrats in the short-term, it certainly does not help liberals in either the short or long term. What you get is a shift of the spectrum. As more wingnuts gain power, the mainstream Republicans have to shift in their direction in order to win primaries or suffer the same fate as Castle or Murkowski (god I never thought I could speak of Murkowski as preferable to somebody). Therefore, Democrats can move into the center-right position and pick off votes from what used to be in the Republican base. Unless a far left-wing Tea Party type movement takes off (and I don’t think there is any danger of that any time soon), the Democrats are free to ignore liberals with no reprisal. So the entire country shifts to the right. I can’t even believe how many Democrats are in line with the Bush tax cuts of doom. But they smell much needed votes if they move that direction.