Tales of the Tea Party

„The »Tea Partiers are racists« theory is the most inflammatory storyline, but there are many more. Let’s consider them, in order of increasing plausibility:

THE TEA PARTIES ARE DRIVING REPUBLICANS OFF A POLITICAL CLIFF. This has been a common assumption since the Tea Parties first sprang up, and in some cases — Christine O’Donnell; Carl Paladino; and Rich Iott, the Nazi re-enacting House candidate — it has been vindicated. But just as often, the Tea Parties have elevated smooth-talking, eminently electable candidates, from Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania to Marco Rubio in Florida and Ken Buck in Colorado. Liberals insist that the cliff-plunge is still coming — it’s just been postponed until 2012. O’Donnell’s primary victory, for instance, was hailed as proof that Republicans would inevitably nominate Sarah Palin for president, dooming their party to a devastating defeat. But the Tea Partiers may prove more pragmatic than their critics hope. In a recent Virginia Tea Party straw poll for 2012, the surprise winner wasn’t Palin: it was New Jersey’s governor, Chris Christie, nobody’s idea of an unelectable extremist.

THE TEA PARTIERS ARE PUPPETS OF THE SINISTER RICH. They’re an »Astroturf« movement, this theory goes, rather than a real grass-roots uprising — a narrative that got a boost this summer when The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer published a much-discussed takedown of the Koch brothers, billionaire libertarians who have financed groups that organize and strategize for the Tea Parties. But the Kochs have been seeding libertarian causes since Barack Obama was a community organizer, without ever conjuring up anything remotely like the Tea Party. Attributing the anti-Democratic backlash to their machinations is a bit like blaming George Soros for Bush-era opposition to the Iraq war: in both cases, it’s more likely that the money is following the public mood than the other way around.”