by Jules Witcover

Reading tea leaves depends on how you hold and tip the cup. The deft fortune-teller, like the deft political operative, can usually see in them what he or she wants to so.

So it is with the postmortem analyses of the primary election season victories of Republican candidates who have ousted their own party's incumbents, from Colorado to Delaware, this year.

To the enthusiastic soldiers in this new political army of dissent against existing establishment figures and President Obama in particular, the tea leaves portend a coming major shakeup in Washington, and in the Republican Party itself.

While the Democrats in Congress are the prime targets at this juncture, the tea party rebellion also aims at insufficiently conservative Republicans, including all those who went along with the deficit accumulation of the George W. Bush years.

That phenomenon was particularly clear in the upset victory of tea party candidate Christine O'Donnell over classic old Rockefeller Republican Mike Castle in Delaware. He made a perfect target for her argument that the GOP in this politically moderate state had lost its way.

O'Donnell made lemonade out of the lemon of non-support for her candidacy by the Republican establishment, both in Delaware and around the country. She thumbed her nose at it, declaring she had won without the old GOP and would win again in November.

She had the perfect tea party foil in Bush political guru Karl Rove. He called her "nutty" and predicted she couldn't beat Castle, and when she did, he declared she cannot beat her Democratic foe in the fall, New Castle County Executive Chris Coons.

O'Donnell gloated too when Delaware Republican state chairman Tom Ross declared her "unelectable." But Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, subsequently announced it would contribute $42,000 to her campaign, and then her website reported pledges of a million dollars for the fall push.

Castle for his part said he would not endorse O'Donnell. The attitude was distinctly not in keeping with the Delaware tradition of burying the hatchet after elections, both intra-party and inter-party.

In all this, it should be remembered that most of the tea party victories this year have come in Republican primaries. The movement has achieved little foothold in the Democratic Party, where differences on many social issues have inhibited any appreciable interest. The big question therefore is whether the tea party appeal can be decisive when Democrats and independents vote.

So far, thanks to the intensity of tea party activists, Republicans have shown much higher enthusiasm in their primaries than the Democratic have in their contests. But the sudden success of tea party-backed candidates on the other side could finally shake the Democratic lethargy that has set in since the Obama phenomenon of 2008.

For longtime activist Republicans, the emergence of the tea party presents the question of whether the GOP is in danger of being hijacked by "outsiders" who are determined to purge the old party of any remaining semblance of moderation.

O'Donnell herself on election night spoke in grandiose terms of "changing the system," and later of her effort being more of a cause than a campaign, buttressed by previous tea party victories in at least seven other Republican primaries.

In a sense, the tea party has been enhanced by the vacuum in national GOP leadership. The Republicans have a mostly silent former president in Texas, party leaders in the Senate and House offering essentially only a policy of obstructionism to Obama, and as yet no identifiable champion to lead the charge in the 2012 presidential election.

The Democrats are counting on the personal weakness of O'Donnell as an also-ran candidate in the past, plagued by personal financial and other problems, to keep Joe Biden's old Senate seat safe for them, thus assuring continued Democratic control of the Senate.

But as a ready vehicle for expressing tea party and other public anger at the establishment, O'Donnell has Sara Palin-like perkiness and clarity of message, and Palin herself in her corner as well. It should temper the Democratic relief at her GOP primary victory in Delaware.

 

Available at Amazon.com:

Aftershock: The Next Economy and America's Future

The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama

The Feminine Mystique

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

 

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Reading the Tea Party Leaves | Politics

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