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The Water Cooler Title: Tea Party Kingmaker Becomes Power Unto Himself On election night last year, South Carolina’s freshman senator, Jim DeMint, convened a conference call with 4,000 supporters to declare the next battle: conservatives had to rally behind Marco Rubio, a relative unknown who was trailing the establishment candidate in the Republican Senate primary in Florida. “His win is going to send shock waves through Washington,” Mr. DeMint proclaimed. A year later, Mr. Rubio is leading in Florida, having driven his primary opponent out of the Republican Party. Other DeMint-backed candidates in the House and the Senate have ridden the same anti-establishment wave from long shot to likely. And the boast that Mr. DeMint made on that call no longer seems so grandiose: “We can reshape the Republican Party.” Financing Tea Party candidates and rallying the Tea Party faithful, Mr. DeMint has established himself as an alternate power center in Washington. And his rapid ascent has spawned a parlor game: what does Jim DeMint want? Supporters in Tea Party straw polls and at conservative conferences have urged him to run for president. Other fans suggest that with several of his candidates poised to win, he could run for Republican leader, making official conservatives’ ascendancy within the party. Mr. DeMint is coy about running for president — and there are plenty of others eyeing the water in the pool of conservative voters where Mr. DeMint would draw his support. He would lack the votes to win as Senate leader; even if all the Tea Party candidates win, their caucus will be small. And many of his colleagues blame him for backing less viable Tea Party candidates who may cost the Republicans a Senate majority, making it unlikely they would give him any leadership position. The role he seems to like best is as his party’s chief antagonist, holding up budget bills he does not agree with and supporting challengers to colleagues he deems ideologically impure. Once the owner of a marketing business, Mr. DeMint has promoted himself as the establishment friend of the anti-establishment crusade. He cheerfully tells people around the country he is “in the doghouse” in Washington, casting himself as the only principled voice in a clubby chamber of big spenders and earmarkers. His Republican colleagues say it is his showboating, not his ideology, that annoys them. But with candidates like Mr. Rubio and Rand Paul, the Republican running for Senate in Kentucky, citing him as their model senator, his tactics could provide a preview of what the Senate could look like with a new crop of conservatives. For all his talk of being an outsider, Mr. DeMint is an insider, just in a different establishment. At a fund-raising dinner for Mr. Rubio in Washington this year, he joked that just by virtue of being there the people in the room could no longer consider themselves “establishment.” But the attendees included some of the most established names in conservative circles: Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform; David Keene of the American Conservative Union; Erick Erickson, the editor of the influential blog RedState. Koch Industries, which finances libertarian causes like the Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity, is among the top donors to both Mr. DeMint and his political action committee, the Senate Conservatives Fund. He has long had associations with FreedomWorks, a promoter of the Tea Party movement. And Mr. DeMint has spent 12 years in Washington embracing the same conservative causes as these groups: abolishing the Internal Revenue Service, replacing the income tax with a flat tax and phasing out Social Security for private investment accounts. Mr. DeMint does not merely generate controversy; he seems to seek it. In his 2004 bid for the Senate, he was forced to apologize after saying he did not think gay people or pregnant single women should be allowed to teach. But several weeks ago, he repeated the comments, telling supporters at a rally that when he first made them, “everyone would come to me and whisper that I shouldn’t back down.” He maintains a marketer’s touch. As a congressman, he once tossed 17,000 pages of the tax code from a hot air balloon. In the Senate, he helped kill a bipartisan proposal for an overhaul of immigration laws by branding it “amnesty.” He later said he had figured out that if he could not get his colleagues to oppose the bill, he could take to talk radio and blogs to generate millions of e-mails and calls against it. His aides declined repeated requests for an interview with Mr. DeMint in the last month, but did send a press release noting that he had raised $7 million for other candidates this election cycle. Mr. DeMint was born in Greenville, S.C. After his father left his mother with four children, his mother started the DeMint Academy of Dance and Decorum in the family home. If one of her students needed a partner, she would summon young Jim. He married his high school sweetheart and after college went to work for his father-in-law’s marketing firm. He eventually started his own. In that role, he met Bob Inglis, who was running for Congress and got Mr. DeMint interested in politics. In 1994, when Mr. Inglis ran for the Senate, Mr. DeMint won the seat he had held. Mr. Inglis lost the Senate race, but won the House seat back when Mr. DeMint ran for Senate. Mr. Inglis lost the seat this year to a Tea Party candidate in the kind of primary challenge that Mr. DeMint has encouraged. Mr. DeMint’s supporters describe him as a blank slate when he first came to Congress, with little ideology and little knowledge of Washington. Barry Wynn, a former South Carolina Republican Party chairman, recalled him asking about various reporters. “One he’d never heard of was Bob Novak,” Mr. Wynn said, referring to the conservative columnist. “He hadn’t been listening to ‘Crossfire’ or whatever people of that era had been listening to to form their views.” He quickly embraced a free-market perspective. His vote to give the president authority to fast track trade agreements infuriated the textile industry that had once been the heart of South Carolina’s economy. But it impressed others as a mark of principle. “That vote characterized him,” said Bill Hewitt, a prominent businessman in the state, “in terms of doing something good for the United States. Although it was bad for South Carolina in the short run.” Mr. DeMint set up the Senate Conservatives Fund in 2008. While other leadership PACs give money to colleagues, his goal was to support the most conservative candidate, even — or especially — if it meant challenging an incumbent Republican. Facing only token opposition in his re-election bid this year, he has devoted much time to campaigning for primary challengers. The fund has distributed $5.2 million to candidates like Pat Toomey, who challenged Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, eventually driving him out of the party, and Joe Miller, who challenged Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska. Mr. DeMint has repeatedly said that he’d rather have 30 Marco Rubios in the Senate than 60 Arlen Specters. “He’s not saying he doesn’t want the majority,” said Mr. Erickson, of RedState. “He’s saying there’s no reason to have a majority if what the Republicans do is identical to what the Democrats would do.” But colleagues like John Cornyn of Texas, say this ignores how power works in the Senate. In 2008 he forced a weekend vote to try to block a bipartisan expansion of President Bush’s AIDS program in Africa — then skipped the vote. And last month, after Republicans agreed they would support Mr. Miller, the Tea Party-backed challenger in Alaska, despite Ms. Murkowski’s decision to mount a write-in campaign, Mr. DeMint sent out a fund-raising appeal to supporters accusing Republicans of not backing Mr. Miller. Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said Mr. DeMint had opened a rift by backing Tea Party challengers. “It is a new and shocking development to have a member of our conference opposing incumbent Republicans,” she said. Republicans give him credit for his early endorsements of primary candidates who captured the Tea Party mood. But other endorsements, colleagues argue, were more about getting media attention for himself than making a principled stand. For instance, he endorsed Rand Paul when it was clear Mr. Paul was going to win. And he endorsed Christine O’Donnell at the last minute — over a Republican who even Democrats expected to win the Senate seat in Delaware. As for his future, Mr. DeMint has written a book with a patriotic-sounding title (“Saving Freedom”), often a sign of a senator with his eye on the White House. And his fund-raising and campaigning around the country have left him with a network that would be vital to any presidential run. He may be betting that rankling his colleagues in Washington can only increase his stature in the rest of the country.
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#1. To: Brian S (#0)
Bravo to him for doing so.
If she's against him, he must have a lot going for him. I hope he turns out to be a whole lot better than Mr. Newt, and his con-job on America.
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