Tea Party draws on tradition of activism

Bill Clinton once said: “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line”. The shock election earlier this week of Christine O’Donnell as the Republican Senate candidate for Delaware has provided ample support for Mr Clinton’s aphorism.

In spite of being dismissed by the Delaware Republican chairman as unfit to be elected as a “dog-catcher”, Ms O’Donnell has watched one horrified establishment Republican after another fall reluctantly into line.

On Tuesday night, Karl Rove, who was George W. Bush’s electoral “boy wonder”, sparked outrage when he described Ms O’Donnell as “nutty” and unfit for public office. Stung by the response, Mr Rove had by Wednesday night endorsed Ms O’Donnell’s candidacy and made a donation to her campaign.

Others, including John Cornyn, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which probably saw its chances in Delaware written off on Tuesday, were just as quick to recant.

It was left to Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter to George W. Bush, to point out that selecting people with as scant credentials and as eccentric a biography as Ms O’Donnell might not inspire wider confidence about the party’s ability to govern.

“In Tea Party theory, inexperience is itself seen as a kind of qualification,” Mr Gerson wrote in his blog on Friday. “People like O’Donnell are actually preferable to people like Rove, because they haven’t been tainted by public trust or actual achievement.”

The next six weeks until midterm election day will test the theory of whether the Republican party has been hijacked by an unelectable fringe, or simply raised its energy levels another notch. But polls suggest that the Democratic party, which could barely disguise its glee at Ms O’Donnell’s victory, might be indulging in wishful thinking.

Most polls indicate the Republicans are still likely to take control of the House of Representatives on November 2. What will happen afterwards is anybody’s guess.

“The Democrats would love to see this election as a choice between two competing visions and if it was, they might well win,” says Bill Schneider, a political analyst. “But in an economy like this, I fear it will simply be a referendum on how people are feeling. They don’t care whether O’Donnell is qualified or not. They want to send a message to Washington.”

Nor, at least in the short-term, can Democrats draw much comfort from the fact that the anti-tax Tea Party movement appears increasingly to be embracing the Christian wing of the right from which it had previously been careful to keep its distance.

The biggest moment came in late August when Glenn Beck, the talk radio host, staged a large rally in Washington based on restoring “honour” and “values” rather than tax cuts and attacks on bureaucracy.

But the election of Ms O’Donnell, who had attacked the apparently pro-abortion views of Mike Castle, the moderate Republican whom she defeated, has helped complete the fusion that seemed already to be under way.

“One of the successes until recently of the Tea Party movement was to keep the religious conservatives in the background,” says Michael Kazin, a leading historian of populist movements in the US. “But if you went to the Glenn Beck rally, you could see it was in long traditions of the tent revivalist meetings.”

Drawing on a more than 200-year-old tradition of citizen activism, best symbolised by Samuel Adams, who organised the original Boston Tea Party, the movement is far from being a new phenomenon in American politics. Like the anti-British revolutionaries of the 1770s, it is far more than simply an anti-tax protest.

At the rally in Washington, Mr Beck, who once said that Barack Obama had “exposed himself over and over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people”, called on Americans to restore a golden age before American values were warped.

“Every demographer will tell you that Barack Obama looks like the America of
the future,” says Mr Schneider. “If you walked around the Beck rally it looked like the America of the past.”

The Tea Party, in other words, is on the winning side of the midterm elections. But it might well be on the losing side of history.