People like
Ron Fournier of the AP keep writing stories about them, so I can't ignore the teapeople as easily as I want to. The media keep speculating about the impact the teapeople will have in the 2010 and 2012 elections; I don't honestly know but my guess is that it'll be much less than media writers think.
First, the Tea Party isn't really a party in the conventional sense. The people who wear the label probably chose it because it has historical connotations, and because tea bags are readily available at a reasonable price. Even the Democrats are more organized than the Tea Party, which tells me something.
Second, the teapeople are not a new voting bloc emerging out of primordial goo. These people have been voting, and from what I've seen, most of them have been voting a long time. The vast majority have been voting for Republicans. If you can find a teaperson who voted for Clinton in 1996, Gore in 2000, Kerry in 2004, and Obama in 2008, I'll buy you a Starbucks. If you can find one who voted for the Dem in any ONE of those elections, I'll buy you a soda pop.
So what we have are a bunch of aging, disgruntled Republicans who voted for Bush/Cheney both times, and may have grumbled a little about budget deficits over the checkerboard --- but only got motivated to join a traveling dog-and-pony show when The N and Democrats started planning the budget. Now they're claiming to be an independent movement, but in reality they're only a Republican splinter group that adds very few votes, if any, to the totals the GOP is already getting.
Third, being made up largely of geezers with too much free time on their hands and lacking even a fraction of the organization of a scatterbrained mob like the Democrats, the Tea Party won't be fielding any candidates of their own. All they can do is try to muscle the GOP into nominating a waste of oxygen like Sarah Palin, or even worse, a Palin wannabe like Rick Perry (the main difference between the two being that Ricardo wouldn't resign his governorship if his worthless life depended on it).
Maybe the Republicans can nominate a candidate like Palin and win a national election in 2012. Strange things happen in American politics. But in reality, Palin was the de facto head of the GOP ticket in 2008, at least in terms of media attention and publicity, and she lost pretty badly to a guy named Barack Hussein Obama. My hunch is that there are still a lot of moderate, independent voters out there who aren't happy about things, but aren't so dissatisfied that they've started dangling teabags from their sombreros. The Republicans need a big chunk of those voters, and I don't see how they'll get them by jumping through hoops to placate a splinter group like the teapeople.
