Best Damn Concern Trolls In The Business*

*Thanks to poster anon for the title.

Atlantic columnist Marc Ambinder, font of conventional wisdom starts to notice that the Tea Party has not helped the GOP all that much, even in the short term.

With the exception of Scott Brown’s miraculous Senate race victory in Massachusetts — and even there, one can question the premise — has the Tea Party movement really done anything to help the Republican Party this cycle?

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In Kentucky, Tea Party avatar Rand Paul’s strict construction libertarianism has suddenly made the Senate race competitive, according to the last polls.

In Florida, there are two explanations for Marco Rubio’s rise: 1) He was his own guy, very popular already, was already capitalizing on discontent with Charlie Crist, was quietly being aided by Jeb Bush’s fundraising network, and received an assist from the Tea Party movement at county conventions. 2) The Tea Party made Marco Rubio. In either case, Charlie Crist bolted from the party, and Rubio has less of a chance to win the general election now than he did — meaning that a Democrat or an independent who will caucus with the Democrats might be able to pick up a Republican held seat.

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I don’t think the TPs energized the GOP base any more than it was already energized. The TP, indeed, is actually distributing that energy to regions of political space that might be harmful to the party itself. Democrats now have a foil, just as Republicans have Obama.

I had assumed that the TP movement would be beneficial to the party in the short-term and harm it in the long-term, but today, it is hard to see where the short term benefits are. Even Scott Brown is tacking back to the center and distancing himself from the TP movement.

Just look at what happened in NY-23. The Republican party wasted a lot of money on that race, which they lost. I just think that articles like this just go to show that it’s very hard for establishment journalists to see anything but conventional wisdom. If they had been reading blogs, this prediction would have come as no surprise.