Here:
"[T]he latest national telephone survey finds that 44% regard Tea Party as a negative description for a candidate."
This is what happens to a movement which allows others to define it and co-opt it. With most of the Republican Party skeptical of the movement at best, threatened at worst, there was none to defend the Tea Party from the outrageous insinuations from the left and its allies in the media. It has died by a thousand paper cuts.
The Tea Party's present bad rap is in many ways its own fault. It assiduously refused to unify as a national movement around a platform of ideas and candidates. As a consequence, it was variously captured by elements of Ron Paul's libertarian movement here and individual Republicans and Republican front-groups there.
As a protest movement the Tea Party needed to change because the initial outrage and emotion which brought it to life is not a sustainable or proper vehicle for conservatism. If it is, then conservatism becomes indistinguishable from the demagogic enemy. Unfortunately for the Tea Party, it opted for the change it got not by choice but by default. Refusing to coalesce as a party around a platform of ending bailouts and cronyism, limiting government spending, and endorsing the candidates who supported that as a matter of the utmost importance all doomed it. Republican interlopers like Michael Steele (who failed), Rep. Bachmann (the Lone Rangerette of the US House), and Sarah Palin (who got the bailout religion very late) pounced early and effectively to steal the limelight.
Political originality is no easy invention, but Tea Partiers were ill-served by devotees of the two-party system when true originalism and enthusiasm for the constitution should have taught the Tea Party that proper political representation is the sine qua non of republican government. And in that struggle for representation it is the two parties as we know them who are most at fault for circumscribing it in a US House of 435 members which should by now consist in 10,267. The coin of the realm has Republican on one side, Democrat on the other, but in the middle is nothing but worthless metal.
Democrats and liberals were entirely happy to jeer from the sidelines as the neophytes were neutered by their political betters in the Republican Party. As usual, it is the Republicans who do the dirty work of liberalism, not the least of which is collecting its taxes and advancing its social agenda incrementally. The reaction of the Tea Party to the radicalism of Obama was profound and deep, as was its dismay by the failure of Republicanism to step up to it.
May the Tea Partiers learn, lick their wounds, and begin planning for another day. Freedom needs them.
