Frank Rich On The Tea Party Movement

New York Times op-ed writer Frank Rich takes a look at the Tea Party movement and the GOP embrace of it:

No one knows what history will make of the present — least of all journalists, who can at best write history’s sloppy first draft. But if I were to place an incautious bet on which political event will prove the most significant of February 2010, I wouldn’t choose the kabuki health care summit that generated all the ink and 24/7 cable chatter in Washington. I’d put my money instead on the murder-suicide of Andrew Joseph Stack III, the tax protester who flew a plane into an office building housing Internal Revenue Service employees in Austin, Tex., on Feb. 18. It was a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen.

Frank discussed the right’s curious embrace of this domestic terrorist and the failure of the GOP establishment to condemn people like Scott Brown or Steve King who tried to claim Stack as their own. I think Brown’s words were more truthful than he intended when he compared his followers to Joe Stack. Rich continues:

Equally significant is Barstow’s finding that most Tea Party groups have no affiliation with the G.O.P. despite the party’s ham-handed efforts to co-opt them. The more we learn about the Tea Partiers, the more we can see why. They loathe John McCain and the free-spending, TARP-tainted presidency of George W. Bush. They really do hate all of Washington, and if they hate Obama more than the Republican establishment, it’s only by a hair or two. (Were Obama not earning extra demerits in some circles for his race, it might be a dead heat.) The Tea Partiers want to eliminate most government agencies, starting with the Fed and the I.R.S., and end spending on entitlement programs. They are not to be confused with the Party of No holding forth in Washington — a party that, after all, is now positioning itself as a defender of Medicare spending. What we are talking about here is the Party of No Government at All.

The GOP is trying to pull the energy and the votes out of the movement and I think they’ll have some success, but this movement doesn’t seem like one that will be satisfied with Republicans talking the talk and not walking the walk. The teabaggers have put up primary challenges against highly conservative lawmakers because of insufficient purity. In fact the Republicans most hated by the movement are long-time legislators who have had to practice the art of compromise during their time, which is how governance works. There’s already been a big backlash against teabagger darling Scott Brown for daring to vote for a very modest Democrat-sponsored jobs bill.

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.

The leaders embraced by the new grass roots right are a different slate entirely: Glenn Beck, Ron Paul and Sarah Palin. Simple math dictates that none of this trio can be elected president. As George F. Will recently pointed out, Palin will not even be the G.O.P. nominee “unless the party wants to lose at least 44 states” (as it did in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 Waterloo). But these leaders do have a consistent ideology, and that ideology plays to the lock-and-load nutcases out there, not just to the peaceable (if riled up) populist conservatives also attracted to Tea Partyism. This ideology is far more troubling than the boilerplate corporate conservatism and knee-jerk obstructionism of the anti-Obama G.O.P. Congressional minority.

We’re starting to see a bit of pushback from the GOP to the teabaggers. Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin have criticized Beck’s CPAC speech, not for the crazy stuff in it, but for its criticism of Republicans. Fox has tried to dismiss the Ron Paul’s win in the CPAC straw poll as votes just from college kids. If Rich is right, the GOP still doesn’t recognize the danger to itself from the Tea Party movement.

I’ve often wondered if the teabaggers are the right’s counterculture movement. Right now, because of the attempts of the GOP to claim them, the teabaggers are associated strongly with the GOP. So the crazy antics and conspiracy theories of the teabaggers will be associated with the GOP for many years to come, even if the GOP starts to renounce them. Many people think that this movement will collapse upon itself like other rightwing populist movements have in the past. The question I have is what kind of damage will they do in the meantime?