[Vision2020] Is the Tea Party Over?

[Art Deco]

a.. 


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

October 9, 2011
Is the Tea Party Over?
By BILL KELLER
Austin, Tex. 

This was supposed to be the Tea Party's time. The incumbent president the rebels despise so much seemed vulnerable. The Republican establishment was AWOL, leaderless or intimidated. So the angry, God-fearing, government-loathing populist insurgents rushed into the vacuum, fired up the town halls, helped put a halt to any compromising in Congress and basically commandeered the national debate. 

Then, for much of this year, they dominated the auditions for a presidential challenger. 

In a spectacle about as deliberative as speed-dating, candidate after candidate tried out for the role of Not Mitt Romney - including, at times, Mitt Romney. We had the Sarah Palin tease, replaced by the short-lived Michele Bachmann infatuation, after which everyone swooned, briefly, for Rick Perry. Herman Cain is having a little fling now, though even voters who like his style don't think he can win. Rick Santorum, who is in some ways the moralizing social conscience of the Tea Party, and Ron Paul, who plays its geeky libertarian id, have settled into single digits and bit parts as debate foils. Newt Gingrich is the class cutup, blowing raspberries at journalists. 

To be fair, some of this unedifying scramble can indeed be blamed on the press corps. Special props go to the hyperactive political news sites that crave a fresh narrative every 15 minutes, even if it's a sitcom like Donald Trump. And a hat tip to Fox News, which has helped trivialize the campaign by offering a platform to one not-ready-for-prime-time Republican semi-celebrity after another. On behalf of journalism, sincerest apologies for wasting so much of your time. 

But the fickleness of the G.O.P. is not entirely a media phenomenon. The latest Fox poll offered Republican voters a menu of 11 candidates and found that not only were voters scattered across the conservative landscape, but a quarter of the Tea Party adherents sampled were still "not impressed" with anyone. It's hard to impress a movement that only knows what it is against. 

"Ronald Reagan couldn't get past first base in today's environment," said one Texas Republican operative who has turned despondent about the party's drift. 

Now, barring some wild twist of fate, there are two men standing: Mitt Romney, the methodical, thrill-free, ideologically elastic technocrat from Massachusetts, who has made himself the default nominee; and the last hope of the hard core, the Not Mitt: Rick Perry. 

Anyone in Texas politics will tell you it's too early to put a fork in Perry. Yes, his polls have withered under attack, and he's come across in a couple of debates as a doofus. It's hard to imagine him ever delivering a foreign policy speech as slick as the one Romney made Friday. But Rick Perry, as they like to say down here, is serious as a heart attack. And I don't think it's just that Texans have a hard time imagining Perry losing because he's never done it. 

Visitors to Austin are constantly reminded that Perry has a lot of rich friends, that regional booster states South Carolina and Florida will vote early, that Romney inspires no passion in the base, and that the Texan will do whatever it takes. The assumption here is that the voters drawn to Herman Cain will revert to Perry once they realize how really far Cain is from being qualified. 

Perry brings to the campaign, besides great posture and polished good looks, an economic record that looks like a vindication of Tea Party dogma, never mind that it was made possible by a quarter of America's known oil reserves, a lot of low-wage immigrants, a reluctance to waste government money on frills like education and health care, and a tax and regulatory environment out of the Wild West. 

On paper - and, for all I know, in his heart - Perry is the most ardent of Tea Party ideologues. His book, "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America >From Washington," is a manifesto of 10th Amendment hyperfederalism and radical individualism, assailing the constitutional basis of Social Security, the income tax, the Federal Reserve, consumer protection, and "federal laws regulating the environment, regulating guns, protecting civil rights, establishing the massive programs and Medicare and Medicaid, creating national minimum wage laws, establishing national labor laws," and so on. 

The editor of Texas Monthly, Jake Silverstein, sums up Perry as "a child of the mythology of the frontier," in which "every man is more or less for himself, a good neighbor is one who needs no help, and efforts by the government to interfere are not to be trusted." 

To this Perry adds a damn-the-pointy-heads denialism - global warming is a hoax, evolution is just "a theory that's out there" - as well as a wink to the evangelicals, a nod to the executioner, and an ardent defense of personal liberties for those who are heterosexual and don't need an abortion. He may not believe in evolution, but his survival-of-the-fittest view of society is pretty Darwinian. 

Temperamentally, he has a fever of class resentment that appeals to voters who see themselves trodden by elites. Perry knows the right way to hold a pitchfork. 

There are plenty of Perry-watchers who see him as less of a populist ideologue and more of an opportunist, which is an unkind way of saying he is a politician. 

"He looked on paper like the Marlboro Tea Party guy," a member of a rival Republican camp told me. "It turned out he's vacuous and practical. So the bloom is off the rose." 

Maybe. But whatever you think of his deviations from Tea Party purity, they make some sense in the context of Texas. His decision to let children of illegal immigrants attend state colleges at the in-state tuition rate, which so scandalizes the zero-tolerance conservatives, is conventional bipartisan pragmatism in Texas. The logic is: if the federal government can't keep illegals out, it's not our fault, but we can at least steer them away from the welfare rolls or jails and into productive lives. (It was also, of course, a gesture to the state's large Hispanic electorate.) 

His cozy relationships with lobbyists, like the former aide turned representative of the company that makes the HPV vaccine, might gain him notoriety in some states; here they are part of a crony culture that Texas voters seem to take as a given. Likewise, as much as he deplores federal aid, he takes as much of it as he can get. 

Perry has been clumsy at explaining his digressions from Tea Party gospel, but he doesn't have nearly as much to explain to that constituency as the blue-state front-runner. Romney, to his shame, denied citizens of Massachusetts their sacred right to breathe carbon emissions, swim at polluted beaches and dump their health crises at the emergency room. "Romneycare" is a burden. "Perrycare," by comparison, is just another name for praying you don't get sick. 

In this race, Rick Perry is the Tea Party's dream candidate, the one remaining figure who could translate a noisy backlash into serious power. If Rick Perry loses, the Tea Party will have missed the opportunity of a lifetime. If he wins, Perry being Perry, it's not entirely clear whether he will appease its members, but my guess is he'll try. 

"Rick Perry is the only candidate who would actually close down a cabinet department," one longtime admirer told me, when I asked whether a President Perry would disappoint the Tea Party. "You would see a very happy base - at least for the first term." 

The rest of us are left to recall the advice handed down 10 years ago by the late, wisecracking Cassandra of Texas politics, Molly Ivins: "Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention." 

.




________________________________
Wayne A. Fox
wayne.a.fox at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20111010/a11d6b59/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: nytlogo153x23.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 1877 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20111010/a11d6b59/attachment.gif>