U.S. election: Is the Tea Party over? (Cover your keyboard)

A chilly day in February came to a boil without warning. A frenetic CNBC reporter, Rick Santelli, took the floor at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in 2009 to vent his rage against the U.S. government’s foreclosure-relief plan.

“The government is rewarding bad behaviour,” he ranted to cheering traders. “Subsidized losers” didn’t deserve to have mortgages. The people who needed support were ones who “carry the water instead of drink the water.”

Then, to louder cheers, “I’m going to have a Chicago Tea Party in July, all you capitalists that want to show up at Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing!”

Hailed as America’s most invigorating new political movement of the 21st century, it poured across the country into state legislatures and the seat of government in Washington — a movement steam-powered by people who were mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

By the time the Republicans won a thumping majority of 242 to 193 in the House of Representatives in 2010, the Tea Party was a force to be reckoned with in the most hallowed halls of American politics.

In this week’s election, Senate hopefuls Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin were trounced after overheated remarks about women and rape. Popular partier Josh Mandel, a former Ohio state treasurer, was steamrolled by incumbent Sherrod Brown, named the capital’s most liberal legislator.

One-time pin-up boy Scott Brown lost his Massachusetts seat to consumer activist Elizabeth Warren, mooted for an eventual run at the White House.

High-profile North Dakota lawmaker Rick Berg — who succumbed to right-wing pleas to run in Washington — was sent back west after just one term, and a squeaky-close election.

Paul Ryan, the Tea Party’s favourite budget head-butter, kept his seat in the House, but lost his bid for the vice-presidency under the more moderate Mitt Romney.

Uber-partier Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, a founder of the House’s much-feared Tea Party Caucus, hung onto her seat by a (manicured) fingernail. Sandpaper-tongued Congressman Joe Walsh was shot down by Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq combat veteran and double amputee whom he slagged as a dubious “true hero.”

And House freshman Allan West, a rare black Tea Party candidate known for his extreme rhetoric and attack ads, narrowly lost in Florida to Democratic rival Patrick Murphy.

Although the Tea Party’s hope for a Republican Senate majority is quashed — the Democrats will keep their slim advantage but miss the 60 seats needed for easy passage of bills — the House remains firmly in Republican hands.

Those who have studied the movement closely say that reports of the Tea Party’s death are premature, and prospects for political compromise still distant.

“It’s a more liberal Senate,” says Norman Ornstein, co-author of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, on the rise of extremism in American government. “But the House grows more conservative and polarized.”

Most of the Republican freshmen who were elected in 2010 won again this time, but at the price of resisting compromise.

“They were challenged from the right. The lesson they learned is that you move to the centre at your peril,” Ornstein said.

Discipline imposed by House leaders under the sway of the Tea Party’s “no surrender” ideology has kept it that way. So has the redrawing of congressional districts. And the primary process, in which moderates who win seats can be removed from the next election slate, makes it likely that the Tea Party’s grip will not slip any time soon.

The big money that has flowed into the Tea Party from its early days has also ensured that candidates stay steeped in the movement’s policies.

“The national billionaire-backed advocacy groups that manipulate funding and endorsements in the name of the Tea Party are not merely trying to win the next election for the (Republicans),” say Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson in their book The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.“Instead they aim to remake the Republican Party into a disciplined, uncompromising machine devoted to radical free-market goals.”

Those goals include smaller government, lower taxes and shrinking social programs for the “undeserving” poor who were the subject of Santelli’s rant.

But Harvard sociologist Skocpol, who has studied the movement since 2009, points out that the Tea Party’s influence is more complicated than that, and its amoeba-like quality — oozing from the grassroots to the pinnacles of power — makes it hard to pin down, or to shut down.

“A lot of those at the grassroots are regular folk whipped up to activism by fear, which often comes from media hype. They are in their own right-wing world locked into things that aren’t true,” she says.

“They put pressure on the office-holders to stick to that agenda, and so do the big money funders who want no compromise.”

In the past, says Tea Party constitutional scholar Rob Natelson of the Colorado-based Independence Institute, similar conservative groups have sprung up and vanished once a Democratic president leaves office. But prospects for a quick exit for this movement are dim.

“People are asking if it will give up now and go home,” he says. “The answer is that (President Barack) Obama hasn’t been replaced. Some of the folks may be demoralized, but the Tea Party won’t dry up and fade away.”

Eventually, though, the movement appears doomed unless it can weed out the extreme social-conservative factions that dragged it down in this election, connect with mainstream values and re-energize younger members.

“The dividing line for (joining) the Tea Party is about 45,” says Skocpol. “They’re older voters who are frightened by the changes hitting them all at once. Doomed? It will take a while.”

Rick Santelli called “frenetic” just because he knows a thing or two and has the math to back it up. Heard he was sent to reeducation camp after that but he still has his moments.

Honestly it’s time for a third party, the Tea Party - organized, but still puts up candidates in republican primaries and will only support candidates that uphold Tea Party principles or we stay home.

Those candidates better be qualified and vetted, or you wind up with a deal like we had in Indiana where we traded an 80% Republican for a 97% Baraqqi.

Because the candidate couldn’t answer the same question Stephanopolus asked in the Republican POTUS primary debates back in January.

Usually the tea party trades up. like in Texas when they replaced Dewhurst with Ted Cruz.

May 10— Sarah Palin has weighed in on the fiercely competitive Texas Senate primary race with an endorsement of Ted Cruz, the tea-party-backed candidate announced on his website Thursday.
Mr. Cruz, pulling 26 percent of likely Republican voters in the latest Public Policy Polling survey, is hoping to finish well enough in the May 29 Texas GOP primary to make it into a July 31 runoff with Mr. Dewhurst, who is comfortably in first with 38 percent.

========== Dewhurst leads Cruz in the PPP poll, 46 percent to 29 percent.

6 posted on 11/09/2012 4:14:33 PM PST by ansel12 (Todd Akin was NOT the tea party candidate, Sarah Steelman was, Brunner had tea party support also.)

Agreed, but the Tea Party will not be recognized until it has actual members and with that some clout.
I would register as a Tea Party member.

It has been mentioned elsewhere, too. Funny, the writer takes a shot at Brown's “pin-up” but something more substantial as Warren's false portrayal of her heritage is ignored.

Viscount Monckton gave an analysis of his experts analysis of the fraudulent Obama birth certificate to a California Tea Party meeting. I think some Tea Party members are still keeping active this aspect of Obama’s eligibility. If he was a fraud before the election he is still a fraudulent usurper if not more so now. Some people do not believe they must/need to throw in the towel or disown the Constitution for expediency.

I have a feeling that we’re about to see a public resurgence of the tea party. I say public because the tea party has remained active and has continued to make gains.

Some republicans probably wish that the tea party had not defeated Charlie Crist of Florida, and replaced him with Marco Rubio.

Many of us think that was an incredible stroke of luck for our future.

“”On the eve of the RNC 2012 convention in Tampa, former Gov. Charlie Crist tossed a wrinkle into Florida politics by announcing Sunday an endorsement of President Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney.””

12 posted on 11/09/2012 4:21:53 PM PST by ansel12 (Todd Akin was NOT the tea party candidate, Sarah Steelman was, Brunner had tea party support also.)

Sarah left us behind.