A Bad Night for Tea Party Radicals

On Tuesday, voters managed to impose limits on their liberal president while also rejecting many of the tea party's most unqualified candidates.

I have an article in today's London Times. Behind a paywall, but the conclusion below:

The best news for Republicans from the Tuesday vote is that after the first euphoria, the results may chasten Tea Party enthusiasm for more internal blood-letting. Rand Paul, the Kentucky ultra-libertarian, may arrive burning for confrontations with his fellow Kentuckian, the Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell. But Paul will arrive with fewer allies than he might have expected 72 hours ago.

Paul will discover that the other big Tea Party winner – Florida’s Marco Rubio – is much more a regular party man than a Tea Partier. A former speaker of the Florida House, Rubio is a protégé of former Florida governor Jeb Bush. (Bush was standing and clapping on the stage at Rubio’s victory party Tuesday night.) While Paul’s victory speech breathed defiance and confrontation, Rubio’s was self-effacing and conciliatory.

Another Tea Party favorite, Sarah Palin, had a bad night.

Palin had done well through the primaries. Her endorsement tipped the balance in nomination contest after nomination contest. But three of Palin’s endorsees proceeded to lose in the general election – one of them in her home state of Alaska.

It gets worse for Palin. Palin’s leading rival in state politics, incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski, achieved the incredible feat of winning as a write-in candidate over Palin’s pick, Tea Partier Joe Miller. (Nobody has won a Senate election as a write-in candidate since Strom Thurmond in 1954 –and Thurmond is a much easier name to spell.)

Murkowski’s triumph raises the question: Could a Palin-led Republican presidential ticket even be quite sure of winning Palin’s home state? Alaskans, it turns out, were not pleased by their governor’s decision to quit her job half-way through her term to cash in her celebrity in the Lower 48.

All these results together add up to a hopeful conclusion: American politics often presents a gaudy spectacle. Oddball candidates can grab disproportionate attention. (One survey found that Christine O’Donnell got more press in the last month of the election than any other Senate candidate.) But the American voter is more careful than he or she gets credit for. On Tuesday, the voters rebalanced American government, and imposed some limits on their adventurous liberal president. But they rejected manifestly unqualified candidates – and also indicated some limits for the resurgent GOP. The spectacle now closes for the season. The hard work of governing beckons.