LF: Tea With Little Sympathy For US

Bromley illustration

The Tea Party’s startling win in the Delaware Republican primary is a cruel blow to Grand Old Party hopes of gaining control in the US Senate. Christine O’Donnell was the Tea Party’s choice and had the backing of Sarah Palin, darling of the conservative insurgents.

Mike Castle, the man she defeated for the party’s nomination, had been the clear favourite to win in November. Every respected pollster sees Ms O’Donnell, with her record of political failure and train of financial baggage, as a weak candidate likely to lose to the Democrat in the general election.

With the margin of control in the Senate expected to be narrow, that is bad enough. But do the implications go wider? Is the Republican party more interested in purifying itself, even if that means tearing itself apart, than in seizing the opportunity to throttle the administration?

The answer is yes, if you regard the Tea Party as part of the Republican party – but this is debatable. The insurgency has no loyalty to the party. Its members are nearly as disgusted with the Republican establishment as they are with President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress. In their view, a liberal Republican such as Mr Castle is no better than a Democrat. In some ways, he is worse: a traitor to conservatism. Better to have a long shot at electing a proper small-government conservative than an odds-on chance of business as usual.

The challenge for the Republican party was to harness the insurgents’ energy and enthusiasm without being co-opted, and hence crippled. Make no mistake: a Tea Party takeover would ruin the Republicans’ electoral prospects. The insurgents’ agenda, in so far as they have one, is far to the right of mainstream American opinion. The US is a moderately conservative country, pleased to see the Democrats meeting resistance, but that is as far as it goes. The Tea Party’s apparent desire to dismantle the federal government is not widely shared. Ms Palin’s national approval ratings are far lower than Mr Obama’s.

To serve the Republicans’ purpose, the Tea Party had to be kept in check – and in Delaware it ran riot. To be sure, this was an outlier. In half a dozen other states, the Tea Party has helped nominate anti-establishment candidates, some strong (Marco Rubio in Florida) and some weak (Sharron Angle in Nevada); most are doing fairly well in the polls. Only in Delaware did it knowingly turn likely victory into near-certain defeat.

Even if Delaware is the exception, the party has reason to worry. The risk is that centrist and independent voters may be so alarmed by the Tea Party’s influence that they will think twice about voting Republican in November. The main threat to the Democrats this year is disappointed swing voters – centrists who voted for Mr Obama and feel let down. The Republican party was already too conservative to win their votes every time. If the Tea Party pushes Republicans even farther from the middle, swing voters may prefer not to vote at all.

Between now and the election, much will depend on the role Ms Palin and her disciples play on the national stage, either by choice or by media request. Centrists will want to know: is this the new Republican party? For the moment, polls show that independents continue to back Republican candidates: the Tea Party’s victories are seen as merely local upsets. But this could change.

After the election, it most likely will, and the Republican party will then face its real test. In a midterm election, the party in opposition does not need a policy programme – especially if the administration is unpopular, as this one is. Next year, Mr Obama and his team will still be in the White House. For now, a disenchanted electorate need worry only about slowing him down. Voting Republican will do that.

In 2012, the Republicans must tell the electorate what a Republican government would actually do. At the moment, “there is no ‘there’ there”. The party has a set of conflicting prejudices rather than a policy programme. It wants to cut the deficit, cut taxes and maintain spending on defence, Medicare and Social Security. This is bald-faced nonsense. For November, it does not matter. For 2012, the party will have to come up with some policies.

And the question is, what role will the Tea Party play in that process? The insurgents’ ideas on policy seem no better formed than that of the mainstream party. They have slogans – “Don’t step on me”, “Win back the country” and so forth – and they are angry, and that is about it. Moreover, the Tea Party is organisationally incapable of forming a programme, something that requires negotiation, compromise and people in charge. The Tea Party repudiates all three.

If the centre feels demoralised and unrepresented – and it has every reason to – it had better prepare for worse. Democrats in Congress have embarked on an ambitious and transformative programme, one that Mr Obama is willing to facilitate. Republicans, already well to the right of where they were even a decade ago, must now come to terms with a populist insurgency intent on pulling them even farther from the centre.

It is a formula for wrenching reversals in policy, as one side or the other gains control, punctuated by periods of stasis under bitterly divided government. Meanwhile, in this increasingly dysfunctional democracy, who actually represents the larger part of the electorate?