Tea Party Boost May Be Short-Lived

In a recent column, Peggy Noonan proclaimed that the tea party "saved" the GOP. But its still unclear if the movement will have any staying power after 2010.

Peggy Noonan recently wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal in which she proclaimed, among other things, that "the Tea Party saved the Republican Party".

In a practical sense, the tea party saved the Republican Party in this cycle by not going third-party. It could have. The broadly based, locally autonomous movement seems to have made a rolling decision, group by group, to take part in Republican primaries and back Republican hopefuls.

As a centrist Democrat, I'm probably not part of the target audience for her piece, but it still left me wondering:

Noonan doesn't cite any evidence to support the notion that the Tea Party movement was poised to form a third-party movement. Most Tea Partiers are Republicans or lean Republican. Formation of third parties is extremely difficult, so one should expect political activists, even disgruntled ones, to stay within the ranks of one of the two main political parties.

Noonan also writes:

The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration's spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so.

This comment raises two questions, has the Tea Party really moved the GOP away from the policies of George W. Bush, and if so, is that a good thing?  First of all, it appears that much of the donor base that supported President Bush is still funding the GOP, including Karl Rove's network via the American Crossroads group.  One would think that if the GOP was moving away from Bush-era politics, Bush-era donors wouldn't be so quick to open their pocketbooks. Is the Tea Party, and by extension, the GOP, turning against tax cuts, the war in Iraq and partial privatization of Social Security?  I suspect the answer is no, and if the answer is yes, one should ask whether abandonment of such longstanding conservative priorities is a good idea.  Furthermore, as has been written multiple times at this website, the GOP faces real demographic problems with respect to voter outreach, and the Tea Party doesn't appear to be successfully reaching out to groups that the GOP doesn't already appeal to.

Noonan continues, writing that "the tea party stiffened the GOP's spine by forcing it to recognize what it had not actually noticed, that we are a nation in crisis." Saying America is "a nation in crisis" in 2010 though is a bit like saying "technology is the path to the future".  The only proper response to that statement is, no kidding.

Furthermore, she adds:

The second fact of 2010 is understood by Republicans but not admitted by Democrats. It is that this is a fully nationalized election, and at its center it is about one thing: Barack Obama.

I'm pretty sure everyone in political circles understands that President Obama is the central issue of the upcoming midterm elections.  Also, is this different from the midterm elections of 1994, 1998, 2002 or 2006?  Midterm elections have been an evaluation of the person sitting in the White House for at least the last several election cycles, if not longer.  While we have all heard Tip O'Neill's famous comment that "all politics is local", this is decreasingly true of modern mid-term elections.

A recent Washington Post piece further discusses the Tea Party's political characteristics.  It states that Tea Partiers are generally new to political activity, are dissatisfied with both political parties and that seventy percent of the Tea Partiers polled have not participated in political campaigning this year.

If this data is correct, it appears that the Tea Party movement currently is a largely unorganized, admittedly grassroots-oriented group of populist conservatives, one that, as stated in the Post article, "could just as easily recede, particularly if the economy improves".  While the Tea Party may be helpful to the GOP in this election cycle, it is not clear that it is indicative of a longer-lasting political trend or is anything greater than a more vocal manifestation of the sort of movement one would expect to see during the first midterm election of an activist Democratic president.