Tea Anyone---Round Two

Back on February 1, 2010 I wrote a blog entitled, Tea Anyone? I wrote then that “Our country’s newest craziest political weirdos, the Tea Party or Tea Baggers as they like to call themselves, are going main stream. Initially I thought that this fringe group made up mostly of folks driven mad by our county’s election of its first black President, would get some headlines, make a fuss and hopefully wreak havoc on the Republican Party since it was Republicans who first recognized them as “credible.”

Well, look at what has happened.

The signs of a coming change in national leadership were never more evident than in 2006 when the Democratic Party took control of both the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Senate. The 2008 national elections, the second straight election in which the Republicans suffered a staggering defeat, left the Republican Party drained of many of its loyal supporters, those Republicans who had in the past towed the party line for the most part, even if they disagreed on some individual social issues. What remained was like crud at the bottom of a coffee pot—an angry, hateful base that resented, loathed and to some extent feared President Barack Obama and that fervently believed that the GOP had lost power because it had lost its conservative way. This new Republican base quickly branded itself the Tea Party movement and they committed themselves to ridding the GOP of those responsible for the ascendancy of a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President.

It was the Tea Party movement that convinced Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, a 30 year Republican United States Senator that he could not win the nomination of the Pennsylvania Republican Party and so he subsequently switched to the Democratic Party. It was this same movement that brought to an end, the senatorial career of Robert Bennett, an 18 year Republican Senator from Utah as that State’s GOP refused Senator Bennett the party’s nomination and it was the Tea Partiers who caused Charlie Crist, Florida’s Republican governor and current candidate for the Senate to flee the Republican Party in order to survive to the general election—knowing he could not withstand the onslaught of Mark Rubio, the Tea Party favorite in the Florida Republican primary. The Tea Party movement also got Rand Paul, son of libertarian U.S. Congressman Ron Paul, the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky, who has so infamously stated that he would have probably not voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the nomination of little-known Joe Miller in Alaska, victorious over incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski.

And it was this same Tea Party that earlier this week engineered the utterly improbable victory of Christine O’Donnell, a right wing politician who has equated lust with adultery and claimed that her political opponents are constantly stalking her, into winning Delaware’s Republican nomination to the U.S. Senate. In doing so, she abruptly ended the stellar career of Mike Castle, two-term governor and Delaware’s U.S. Congressman for nine straight terms.

Right up to the closing of the Delaware polls, few felt that the Tea Party crowd could actually pull this one off. The race moved to the top of the Tea party’s list when Senator Murkowski crashed and burned in Alaska and with that unexpected victory, which had cost the Tea Party Express more than $600,000, all energy went into Delaware, where Mike Castle possessed many of the same establishment credentials as Murkowski.

As the Tea Party Express pulled into Delaware, the Republican establishment reacted aggressively at the nerve of the outsiders, albeit it a little too late in the primary campaign. In the end however, it was not just the Delaware Republican establishment that rallied to the defense of both Mike Castle and Michelle Rollins (the Delaware GOP pick for Congress), it was the national Republican establishment as well, particularly the likes of Karl Rove, the so-called genius behind the George W. Bush presidencies.

In the final analysis however, none of that mattered as the Castle and Rollins candidacies were poised for disaster when on the Sunday before the election, polls showed Christine O’Donnell climbing ahead, 47 to 44 percent. Glenn Urquhart was also polling well in the race for the House and we all know what finally happened, Mike Castle and Michelle Rollins won in New Castle County while downstate, they received a political drubbing, costing them both the nomination in their respective races.

Now that the political dust has settled, the national Republican infrastructure will have to make the ultimate decision—whether to support O’Donnell and Urquhart with financial resources. The polling firm that showed O’Donnell ahead just days before the vote has measured her support in the upcoming general election at 29-50 percent. Only 31 percent of Delaware voters think she is qualified to hold office and she is running 26 points behind New Castle County Executive and Democratic Senate nominee Chris Coons.

O’Donnell’s supporters will argue (almost gleefully) that she will catch the country by surprise again in November just as she did in the Republican primary. Sure enough, the worst mistake the Coons campaign could ever make would be to not take O’Donnell seriously or to view her as a candidate without any credibility. As someone who was a distant second to Mike Castle prior to the Republican primary however, no one understands how quickly events can turn against you as Chris Coons does, so that will probably not happen.

More importantly, the sentiment among general election voters seems to match up with how these voters view the Tea Party movement as a whole: visceral enthusiasm, hostility towards almost everyone but themselves and a generally isolationist mentality. Running in last week’s primary that was closed to all voters but Republicans allowed O’Donnell to campaign in a voting universe just barely narrow enough for her to pull off a victory. The November electorate will expand across the whole of the political spectrum, and even though there are a large number of angry voters out there in both parties, it is still difficult to imagine that someone with Christine O’Donnell’s image challenges, which will only get worse as the media continues to shine even more light on her, can pull of a general election victory.

To regain control of the Senate, Republicans will need to win 10 currently held Democratic seats in November. And even if they manage to convince Connecticut’s Joe Lieberman to caucus with them, and then only require nine seats to win the majority, they have been counting Delaware since Mike Castle announced his intention to run for the Senate and we all know now that just ain’t gonna happen. Color me not ready to take anything for granted and willing to work for Chris Coon’s election…….and happy, at least for Delaware!