I think, if anything, it’ll end up being Ross Perot x 100.
Look at the New York governor’s race. You have Andrew Cuomo as the Democrat nominee, Carl Paladino (a TPer) as the Republican nominee and mainstream Republican Rick Lazio (who lost the primary in spectacular fashion) as the nominee of the Conservative party. Paladino and Lazio will split any Republican/conservative votes and Cuomo will win in a landslide.
There’s just no other way this can end.
Good point! “Cap and trade” is an idea which originated with neolib, free-market-solves-everything, turn-everything-into-a-commodity economists, whose philosophy generally aligns with the ideals of the right/conservatives/Republicans.
Just yet another idea that Republicans once loved, until that scary Kenyan guy in the White House started to like it, too.
Well, Cuomo would’ve won anyway. I mean, this is New York. But what I find truly bizarre about this whole situation is that Tea Party Republicans are seemingly more right-wing than the right-wing third parties. I mean, why would Murkowski try to run as a Libertarian after losing to a challenger who was *more *conservative? And how is Lazio the Conservative Party candidate after losing to Paladino in the Republican primary? Is the TP too conservative for the Conservative and Constitution Parties?
The Repub party always claims fiscal reason and a smaller government until they get in. Then they do the opposite. I suppose that is why the Tea Baggers are gaining traction. But Clinton balanced the budget. He was a fiscal conservative.
I don’t know what Obama would have been like without the fiscal crisis that Bush and the Repubs left him. But he was forced to back expensive programs to presumably save the economy. His hands were tied.
O’Donnell is a walking ,talking “none of the above”. She is an anti-candidate. But if she won ,she could do real damage with her stupidity.
To me, O’Donnell sounds like a half-wit with crazy ideas and questionable ethics. But I’d choose her over Maxine Waters, Sheila-Jackson Lee, Tom Tancredo, or any number of other half-wits and crooks that have floundered around in the House and Senate.
The House in particular is populated by extreme figures and morons. Far too many of them are there because they won elections in extreme districts, or because they are mouthpieces for vested interests who funded their campaigns and keep them in their back pockets.
The mportant thing about the tea party is that it’s a leaderless organization. This is throwing Republicans and Democrats for a loop. It throws Democrats for a loop because the strategy of any opponent in a political race is to target the leader, marginalize him or her, and bring the organization down with the leader. That’s what happened with Perot’s movement - it was too tied to the flake at the top. The minute he beclowned himself, his movement fell apart.
But the Tea Party has no leader. Sarah Palin is probably the closest thing to a leader it has in the sense that she’s a national figure closely associated with the movement, but she’s not its leader. No one listens to her for policy direction. She’s basically just a cheerleader. And plenty of people in the Tea Party movement do not like her at all. Palin’s negatives have been climbing again (up to 46% disapproval now), but it’s not affecting the popularity of the tea party one bit. It’s still growing in power and support.
For Republicans, a leaderless ‘loyal opposition’ is a big problem, because there’s no one they can haul into a back room and deal with or knock sense into. There’s no steering committee they can talk to. So if the Tea Party heads off in an electorally destructive direction, there’s just nothing they can do about it.
The Tea Party is the first of a wave of political movements like this that I think we’ll see. It’s only in the past few years that communication tools have arisen to allow this kind of ad-hoc structure to form and thrive as a national movement. The two biggest ones are facebook and Twitter. Another is that the tools for online media (blogs, podcasts, video) have gotten more sophisticated and are enabling the aggregation of material into new “networks”. PajamasMedia is run by Hollywood screenwriters and production people, has real studios, and is making enough money with subscriptions and advertising to continue growing. It’s putting out almost a full day’s worth of programming every day.
There’s no doubt that the Tea Party is also benefiting from the star power of Sarah Palin and the ability to reach the masses of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. But they’re more tools of the movement (heh heh) than they are ‘leaders’. When Palin endorsed Fiorina and McCain, she took a fair bit of damage in her standing in the Tea Party. They’re not doing what she wants - she’s forced to do what they want or lose her position.
Being a leaderless organization means it’s also hard to pin down exactly what they stand for. They don’t stay ‘on message’ because there are too many of them spread too far around the country for there to be a completely coherent platform. This is an organization supported by hard-core athiests like Penn Jillette and Andrew Brietbart as well as by fundies like O’Donnell. So the only thing you can say about what they stand for is to look at the intersection of their beliefs and find the common points.
If you drew a Venn Diagram of all the beliefs in the Tea Party, you’d find one area of overlap - less government. That’s pretty much the universal connecting thread between all the tea party groups. You’ll find some that are athiests, you’ll find some that are pro-life and some that are pro-choice. But you won’t find a tea party group calling for more overall government control and a larger federal government.
If you put partisanship aside for a moment and think of the tea party as a generic structure and ignore their politics, you might see that this is a very healthy turn of events for a democracy, in that it should help limit the ability of powerful special interests to hijack the government. I think people on both sides of the political fence are sick of politicians who promise them what they want to hear, then get elected and proceed to do the bidding of the establishment and the large special interests that run Washington. Having political movements with real clout always on the sideline ready to destroy people who violate their pledges might be a good thing.
The real question is why there hasn’t been a ‘tea party’ forming on the left.
Because the Left doesn’t lionize their nutters. The extreme left (full socialists, communists, anarchists) hasn’t had an in to the political power center of the party since just before the New Deal. Cynthia McKinney was the last major nutter on the left who actually made it into Congress, and she got primaried out soon after her little contretemps with a Capitol police officer and bolted for the Greens.
Quoth Starving Artist:
Um, outlawing “teh gay” and masturbation would be a huge increase in the scope of government. So what you’re saying is that they don’t care about someone increasing the scope of government, as long as they decrease the scope of government.
I’m wondering if this is going to do to the Conservative Party what the McCall/Cuomo race did to the Liberal Party.
For those who don’t remember, in New York a party is guaranteed ballot access if it gets a certain amount of votes in the last gubernatorial election. So, traditionally, the smaller parties would tie their wagon to one of the major party candidates for governor: The Conservative and Right to Life Parties would endorse the Republican, and the Liberal Party would endorse the Democrat, and enough people would vote for the candidate on the minor party line to guarantee the party sticking around for four more years.
So in 2002, when Andrew Cuomo was ahead in polls and fundraising, and looked like he was going to be the candidate, the Liberal Party endorsed him. Then the Democratic leadership threw their weight behind Carl McCall, Cuomo withdrew from the race, and the Liberals were stuck with his name on the ballot line even though McCall got the Democratc nomination. So, people didn’t vote on the Liberal line, they got dropped from their place on the ballot, and the party basically fell apart.
Is there any evidence whatsoever that any Tea Party candidate wants to increase government power over gays or prohibit masturbation? If not, that’s a straw man argument.
Why is it that people on the right are not allowed to separate their moral views from their political positions, when people on the left are? Jimmy Carter was a pious Christian who prayed for people’s souls and admitted mournfully that he was a sinner who had lust in his heart and asked for absolution. That doesn’t sound too far from what O’Donnell said. So why is it that no one was worried about Carter planning to censor everyone, but O’Donnell is now accused of wanting to make masturbation illegal?
Obama put religion in his campaign as much as any Republican has. He faithfully attended a fairly radical church with a zealot nutbar as its leader, but this was totally ignored as saying anything about Obama himself. But if a Republican so much as gives a speech at a university associated with the Christian right, it’s tar-and-feathering time.
The fact is, Republicans in power have not been trying to push social conservatism. There’s no movement to ban abortion other than among the fringe wing of the party. No one’s trying to ban books or censor TV. No one is attacking gays. In fact, the last political group who tried to censor TV, movies, and video games was led by Tipper Gore.
The war on drugs has bipartisan support. Gay marriage has supporters on both the right and left, and opponents on the right and left. Obama himself does not support gay marriage. Prop 8 in California was shot down because the Obama-supporting black population was strongly opposed to it.
Well, first off, there is no real Left in the U.S., and there hasn’t been since the 70s. There are only a few truly progressive congresspeople, while the majority of the Republican party (even now, before the influx of TPers) are hard right conservatives.
Second, funding. The far Right gets plenty of funding from corporations and wealthy right-wing ideologues. The Left, not so much. Sure, Democrats get plenty of money from Wall St and upper-income people, but that money goes to DLC / pro-corporate Dems…IOW, the center-right. And the issues these people/organizations support are deregulation, free trade (same), or gay rights, abortion (social, not economic).
Thirdly, there is no aggrandizement of the leadership. Partly this is due to the lack of actual progressives in government or the media, but this is also due to a fundamental difference in the way the Left conducts itself. While self-congratulation and mutual encomium exists on the Left too, there is much more division and mutual criticism. For instance, Naomi Klein, whose Left-wing bona fides few would question, has received considerable criticism from the world Socialists. And this is not criticism of the “you’re not sufficiently radical” variety, but rather straightforward academic disagreement with her theories.
Joe Miller made abortion a centerpiece of his campaign:
Whatever his statements on religion were, Carter never proposed changing the law for them. And, even after being cleaned up the GOP, O’Donnell is still anti-abortion except in life-threatening situations:
Sharron Angle is anti-abortion in all cases:
False. Cite?
False. Cite?
Really false.* Do you even self-censor?
You’re killing me here 
… are you serious?
“Bipartisan” yes, but it’s right-wing all the way.
That phrase? I do not think it means what you think it means.
I implied (or thought I was saying outright) that the Tea Party is not interested in outlawing homosexuality and masturbation. In fact, the whole idea of its trying to do so is silly. People around here act as if O’Donnell gets elected to the senate she’s immediately going to outlaw masturbation. Even the president doesn’t have the power to do that.
Obama considers himself religious, but he hasn’t attended any church regularly in a long time.
Sarah Palin tried to ban books back in Wasilla and the Parent’s Television Council routinely tries to get TV they dislike banned.
Do you honestly believe that? Do you think anyone else does? Come on man.
If the PRMC (which is largely defunct) was a political group, then what does that make the PTC?
Probably because it’s hard for leftists to get really, really mad when they see the Dems holding WH and Congress for the first time in so long. The last time something like the Tea Party happened on the left was in the 1960s and '70s – back then, they saw a lot to get mad about.
The Dems being in charge is part of it, but I think the lack of a significant Left is much more important. By contrast, the far right has deep roots and deep pockets.
Oh cut the horse shit. It’s real sappy and all, but the reality here is that the only overlap you’d see on a Venn diagram is that all these nuts were content to go about their business while George Bush increased the size and scope of the government, and only got fired up when a black man was elected president. They care as much about limiting the size and scope of government as I do about the temperature of penguin shit on Pluto.
I fully expect you to argue a technicality here, but I don’t see the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act of 2005 as anything other than censorship, and it was drafted, sponsored, passed, and signed by Republicans.
Yeah, that’s another contrast.
When Bush was in power, conservatives didn’t care about the size of the federal government, the deficit, civil liberties (actually, they still don’t really care about that–they’re only for white people), etc.
Now that Obama’s in power, liberals are still hitting him hard on Afghanistan, civil liberties, torture, rendition, jobs, the public option / single payer healthcare, etc.
Some focus on personality, others focus on principles.
besides the very good points **sleeping **is making regarding the religious conservative positions of several tea baggers, the current crop of republican candidates (not only the tea baggers) are proud anti-scientists.
BTW – who are the Tea Partiers? Demographically, I mean. There seems to be more than one school of thought:
Getting back to the OP topic, I think the long-term effect of the Tea Party will actually be to the disadvantage of the Right, as Republicans will lose in 2012+ whatever gains they made in 2010. While I don’t support the TP, this is not wishful thinking on my part.
I think that, were it not for the TP, the Republicans would be in pretty bad shape nowadays. But the purification of conservative ideology by the TP, satisfying as it might be for the right, will ultimately be the GOP’s undoing. The pretense of a “moderate” stance by Republicans will no longer be possible as TPers will not pay lip service to ideas considered mainstream; instead, they will largely be forthright about privatizing SS, eliminating public education, etc. As the TPers cannibalize the “establishment” GOP, they will also be losing the people who know how to do PR. Thus, there will be fewer people to keep Sharron Angle and Rand Paul on a leash.
Looking forward, the corporate elite will be forced to adopt ever more drastic measures to maintain its power, especially as environmental disasters will become increasingly frequent. There will have to be more fake outrages of “Ground Zero mosques,” “wars on Christians,” etc., and the general populace will gradually become inured to it all. As a result, the U.S. of 2020+ will largely be shaped by how willing progressives will be to dedicate themselves to meaningful change. On this point, I am not too optimistic, as few of my peers seem to have a serious political engagement. But, that may yet change.
Watch “Real Time” with Bill Maher. Apparently Ms. O’Donnell is a witch. Hilarious.
He’s got a bunch of clips of her from “Politically Incorrect” and he’s going to show one every week until she comes on his show. Gotta love Bill Maher.