What role will the Tea Party play in the 2014 midterms?

[BrainGlutton]

@Fear_Itself

Could be worse. They could simply march all conservatives into the showers for the final solution. FEMA has been stockpiling body bags, you know…

Yeah, but, who has lice any more?

I know! We’ll tell them there’s been a fag in the room and they need immediate disinfection or they’ll catch teh gay!

[adaher]

I’m very happy that the idea of not having midterms is so outside the pale that the very suggestion of the idea deserves only derision.

You are on record.

[Gyrate]

@adaher

I’m very happy that the idea of not having midterms is so outside the pale that the very suggestion of the idea deserves only derision.

You are on record.

So are you. How’s that worked out for you so far?

[adaher]

I’m on record as supporting midterms. I don’t think that one will come back to bite me.

[adaher]

And BTW, thank you for your derision of Chris Matthews:

Matthews: No More Midterm Elections So ‘Weird,’ ‘Warped’ Voters Don’t Elect...

[Gyrate]

@adaher

I’m on record as supporting midterms. I don’t think that one will come back to bite me.

I didn’t mean about the midterms; I meant in general.

And if Chris Matthews meant what that article says he said, derision would be deserved, but I don’t think he was serious about abolishing midterms - it reads like hyperbolic ranting. If I were you, I wouldn’t make my stand on a “liberals want to abolish midterms” position just yet, especially since talking heads on MSNBC are much less in sync with liberals than talking heads on Fox are with conservatives.

[adaher]

I haven’t. I was just being flip. But since it wasn’t taken as intended, I figure it’s useful to get Dopers on record as supporting the Constitutional order. These things always sound ridiculous until the talking points start to go out.

[Gyrate]

The left don’t tend to do “talking points” in the same way the right do, more’s the pity.

[adaher]

Anyway, getting back on track, the Tea Party won’t dominate the midterms the way they did in 2010, but they’ll get some wins. Tom Cotton is 100% Tea Party and he leads Mark Pryor now. The GOP leadership is crowing that they are crushing the Tea Party, but it’s more like they are smoothly incorporating it rather than resisting it. I notice there are no Mike Castles or Charlie Crists being nominated for Senate seats. Every single one of the GOP nominees in the Senate races is acceptable to Tea Partiers, except for the fringiest bunch, who will never be happy anyway.

[jayjay]

@adaher

Every single one of the GOP nominees in the Senate races is acceptable to Tea Partiers, except for the fringiest bunch, who will never be happy anyway.

McConnell doesn’t have a Tea Party challenger, then? I just imagined that?

[adaher]

Is that Tea party challenger going to win? Am I also to blame Democrats for drawing LaRouchie challengers in primaries?

[adaher]

Also, McConnell’s problem isn’t that he’s not conservative enough(Bevin himself is not as conservative as a Tea Partier should be, he supported TARP for instance), it’s that McConnells is a DC insider who represents everything that was wrong with the Bush-Delay GOP. IT’s time to finish cleaning those guys out.

[Gyrate]

@adaher

Is that Tea party challenger going to win? Am I also to blame Democrats for drawing LaRouchie challengers in primaries?

Matt Bevin is a serious enough contender to worry McConnell. I’m not writing McConnell off yet - he’s both extremely powerful and well-funded - but unlike a LaRouche election a challenger victory is not outside the realm of possibility, especially given that Bevin is being funded by the Senate Conservatives Fund PAC.

[adaher]

Yeah, but Bevin’s damaged by his TARP endorsement. McConnell is actually more conservative than Bevin. I think there’s two other things at play here: a lot of Republicans would like McConnell to not be the leader anymore, and second, Bevin polls as well as McConnell against Grimes. There’s probably no political cost to making the change. Plus I’d rather just go with new blood if the incumbent isn’t doing well. IMO, incumbents should be winning easily or they should just go home. It’s pathetic to fight for a job so many people want you removed from, just to see if you can eek out that 50%+1 or maybe 45% with a third partier taking some away from your challenger. A good incumbent doesn’t have to do that. Just go home, Mitch. And Landrieu, and Pryor, and Hagan too.

[jayjay]

@adaher

Just go home, Mitch. And Landrieu, and Pryor, and Hagan too.

Hoping we won’t notice that those last three are ALL Democrats (blue-doggies, yes, but still Ds)?

[adaher]

My feeling about incumbents applies to both parties. If you can’t coast to reelection, then that means you are doing a shitty job. Make way for new blood.

[Fear_Itself]

@adaher

My feeling about incumbents applies to both parties. If you can’t coast to reelection, then that means you are doing a shitty job. Make way for new blood.

For once we agree. All Republicans who face a credible Tea Party challenger should just withdraw.

[adaher]

Credible implies they are likely to lose. Bevin is credible in that McConnell will have to work a little to beat him, but McConnell has never been seriously threatened. Now Grimes, that’s a different story, and it exposes that McConnell is not popular in kentucky. He wasn’t the last time he ran for reelection either.

[BrainGlutton]

According to this article, Ted Cruz has a much better chance than Rand Paul of getting TP support because Cruz is a warhawk while Paul (as a good libertarian) is an isolationist.

Which, if true, says a lot about the Tea Party in its current iteration.

But what’s that got to do with the Tea Party, you might ask? The movement is supposedly kaput, having retreated with its proverbial tail between its legs after Ted Cruz embarrassingly read “Green Eggs and Ham” on the Senate floor. And anyway, Liberty U is the Christian Right, not the Tea Party.

But that fundamentally misunderstands what the Tea Party actually is. It’s not a movement, it’s a brand. Or, more specifically, a re-brand that was formed in the wreckage of the Bush administration’s spectacular political flame-out when the True Believers badly needed to distance themselves from the GOP’s failure. It is simply the conservative movement in a tri-corner hat. And that movement, as Ronald Reagan described it, famously sits on a tri-legged stool of traditional values, strong defense and small government. How those issues are emphasized is a matter of the political zeitgeist of a given time.

Now, there would appear to be right there the seeds of a self-destructive internal contradiction, because if “small government” = “cheap government,” then “small government” and “strong defense” are obviously incompatible. The most egregious and expensive manifestation of American biggummint since WWII has been the MIC all along.

Which brings us to the until-recently-avoided third leg of the conservative stool: foreign policy. One gets the sense that enough time and distance from the Iraq debacle has finally passed that the hawks feel they can once more engage. And here is where the problem for Rand Paul really lies. He likes to portray himself as a man of principle in these matters, but his recent comments about the Ukraine and Russia crisis show how difficult it’s going to be to thread the needle as a presidential candidate. He sounds nearly incoherent as he tries to use the traditional GOP rhetoric of “strength” and “will” while staying true to his isolationist beliefs — and succeeds at neither.

As for his stand on civil liberties, it’s been noted that the Tea Party had a very recent miraculous awakening on this issue. If Rand Paul can turn a bunch of elderly white conservatives into permanent civil liberties activists, it really will be a miracle.

By contrast, Cruz has come out swinging. He’s taken a very hard line on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue that’s come up in recent months and seems to be making a play for hawk of the walk. Last week he was among the first to call Iran’s new Ambassador to the UN a “slap in the face” to America and use it to criticize President Obama for being “naive,” the right wing’s favorite descriptive term after “feckless” when talking about Democratic foreign policy.

But, it gets even worse for Paul:

And what about those billionaires? You’d think Rand Paul would at least have the backing of that constituency. After all, he promises to give them everything their little Randroid hearts desire. But they don’t like his foreign policy either and are promising to spend whatever it takes to stop him. In fact, the only real friends Paul has in the GOP are the measly 7 percent of young, white males who call themselves libertarians.

[adaher]

The Tea Party is a coalition of far rightists, libertarians, and reformists. Cruz and Paul are both Tea Partiers and against any establishment Republican would easily win Tea Party support. Against each other, I guess we might find out. Although really, I’d bet on Paul to do better than Cruz in a primary campaign. Paul knows how to be reasonable and he makes an effort to expand his appeal beyond his libertarian base. Cruz is just a fanatic who assumes success without actually having a plan to achieve it. We saw this with the shutdown and his rhetoric on ACA repeal shows the same blindness. He may be hawkish, but until he matures, he’d get us into wars without a plan just like GWB did. I can’t see Rand Paul doing that, and Paul’s not a hardcore isolationist. He’s more isolationist than any mainstream Presidential candidate, but he will fight if our interests are threatened, unlike his Dad.