The Tea Party Is Dead? Nah, That’s Just a Flesh Wound

[DonViejo]

Michael Tomasky

The right wing of the Republican Party is going to get whipped in Tuesday night’s primaries, but its grip is strengthening around the real prize: 2016.

Tonight, the tea party is going to lose some elections. Its Senate candidates in Kentucky and Georgia are going to lose—and lose really, really badly in at least in Kentucky. The theme of the night on cable (and for the balance of the week really) will be the death of the tea party. Everybody’s waiting with a safety net, as Elvis Costello (nearly) sang, but I say don’t bury them ’cuz they’re not dead yet.

Why? Because while 2014 is, to be sure, going to go down as a bad tea party year in electoral terms, we certainly can’t yet say the same of 2016—a much more important year, i.e. presidential. In fact, as of today, what we can say about 2016, speculative as it may be, is that the tea party is if anything in the driver’s seat. The guy we’ve all taken to calling the GOP front-runner, Rand Paul, is a tea party guy. [shouldn’t a compound noun be hyphenated when used as an adjective?] That simple fact alone hardly makes for anything I’d call dead.

Beyond Paul, numerous potential candidates are backed by the tea party or in some sense have that aura about them. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker—even Mike Huckabee, if he casts his lure [good] into the waters, will be fishing in the tea party pond for votes. Yes there’ll be a Chris Christie or a Jeb Bush to represent the establishment. But if most of the candidates are flat-out tea party people or at least tea party friendly creatures, that means to me that the pull of gravity in that primary season is still going to be pretty far to the right, and driven to some decent extent by tea party priorities. And let’s face it: If the party does nominate Paul, the tea party will have won the biggest prize in intra-party politics: determining the presidential nominee. So 2016 could well be a huge tea party year.

But let’s circle back to this year. While it’s true that the majority of tea-party candidates are losing, something else has been going on more under the radar, smartly picked up on recently by Jamie Fuller of The Washington Post. A lot of Republican candidates are trying to finesse the establishment-tea party Maginot Line and be both things to all people. She writes, I believe accurately, that the clear goal of many candidates is “staying comfortable with the tea party while networking with the establishment on the side.” This certainly describes North Carolina’s Thom Tillis. He beat an explicitly tea party backed challenger, but Tillis is still deeply reactionary (eliminate the minimum wage entirely, he once suggested!), he backed the Cruz-led government shutdown, and he is distinguishable ideologically from tea party candidates only in that he’s not quite as wacko as the tea party guy was.

more
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/20/the-tea-party-is-dead-nah-that-s-just-a-flesh-wound.html

[Livluvgrow]

1. There is no Tea Party

It is all the Republican Party. They vote lockstep it doesn't matter which person wins the vote will be the same. We need to quit acting as though there is some moderate wing of the Republican Party that exists and call them what they all are Extreme Right Wing Ideologues. When we develop a fake meme for them we give them cover and they could then portray themselves as moderate and the tea party as extreme even though they vote and think identically. Thus, far right begins to be labeled as moderate and rightward we then move. So, in my opinion we should stop giving them cover.

[AlinPA]

2. Exactly. Every moronic "teabagger" I know is a republican. There is a sub-class of republican,

i.e., the more stupid, more ignorant, more bigoted ones who are what I call "teabaggers".

PA is crawling with them and they have taken over the state.

[blkmusclmachine]

3. How do you know when a Tea Bagging Dittohead Zombie is truly "dead"???

[Dawson Leery]

4. Remember those loud, vile, thugs who accused you of being unpatriotic after 09/11 for opposing Bush?

Tea Partiers. The tea party is the hard right flank of the GOP. They are the 25% who approved of the war criminal, even after the economy collapsed.