Tea Party Series: Stray from the GOP and everyone will lose

Washington (CNN):

Mitt Romney has a message to Tea Party candidates nationwide: If you lose your
Republican primary bids, stay on the sidelines.
The former Massachusetts
governor on Monday warned the grassroots movement not to mount third party
efforts in general elections, which he said would siphon votes from Republican
nominees.

"If there is a conservative candidate that runs in the general
election, then obviously, divide and fail is the result," Romney said in an
interview with the conservative Web site Newsmax. "Hopefully Tea Party
candidates will run in respective primaries and they will either win or lose.
And if they win, they will go into the general. If they lose, they won't, and
they will get behind the more conservative of the two finalists."

Romney explained that "dividing our conservative effort in the general elections" would "basically hand the country to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and that would be very sad indeed."
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin made similar remarks last month in a speech sponsored by the Arkansas Republican Party. "Now the smart thing will be for independents who are such a part of this Tea Party movement to, I guess, kind of start picking a party," she said, adding that the GOP would be the most natural fit for such activists.
Romney had kind words for the Tea Party movement. "I'm really pleased that the silent majority is silent no longer," he said, predicting that the movement "will have have an impact on this election."
"Not all the Tea Partiers are Republicans, not all of them vote for Republicans, but I think most of them will," he said.

Continuing with the Tea Party series, I thought what Romney said was quite appropriate. Earlier, I said that the GOP could use the Tea Party, and in fact needs the Tea Party, because the Tea Party has engaged the "silent majority" to be silent no longer. Then, in the second part of the series, I showed that while the GOP needs the Tea Party, it also needs to make sure to silence and repudiate the "crazy parts" and the fringe of the tea party in order to make sure that the whole is not defined by the rotten few.

Here, I think what Romney says is that while the GOP needs the Tea Party, the Tea Party also needs the GOP. It may be the more conservative part of the Republican Party, but it is undeniably part of the Republican Party. A limb cannot survive without the body, but the body can survive without a limb.

If the Tea Party were to put more conservative candidates in the primaries, that would be great. Let the voters decide. But if the Republican voters choose a more progressive or moderate candidate, like Brown, then the Tea Party needs to honor that choice and try elsewhere. To try and then push someone as a third, more conservative party, would only mean that both the conservative and the republican candidate would split votes, and what would happen? I think Romney said it best: It would "...hand the country to Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, and that would be very sad indeed."

Crossposted at Republicans United

Tea Party Series: To Protest Everything is to Protest Nothing

I read an interesting op-ed piece today, by Leonard Pitts Jr., entitled Crazy and Incoherent. It was printed in the Oregonian, and you can read the entire article here.

Pitts talks about the Tea Parties and many of the extremists found within its ranks. He gives a surprising quote, by Editor in Chief Erick Erickson of RedState, a big name conservative blog:

"At some point, you have to use the word 'crazy.'"
...
Erickson was recently quoted on Politico in a report about how he and other
conservatives are attempting to distance their ideology and the Republican Party
from the paranoid theorizing and loud, incoherent screaming that have recently
passed for discourse on the political right. And of course, the darkly comic
thing about it is that, less than a year ago, some conservatives were exulting
over the tea parties, believing they brought needed energy to a movement
demoralized by its 2008 shellacking at the polls. "The Republican comeback has
begun," declared GOP chief Michael Steele.

What a difference a year makes. Or not.

Some of us after all, have argued all along that the tea parties were about
as "conservative" -- insofar as that term has traditionally been understood --
as ladies night in a Castro Street bar. Indeed, some of us made the same point
about George W. Bush, the putatively conservative president who nevertheless
presided over an expansion of the federal government and of a federal
entitlement program (Medicare), a costly war of choice in Iraq founded on a
shifting rationale, and financial mismanagement that turned surplus into deficit
seemingly overnight. For at least the last decade, then, conservatism has not seemed particularly conservative -- a
disconnect many of the ideology's adherents managed to ignore so long as it was
useful to do so, i.e., so long as it played well at the ballot box. "Just win,
baby" was their mantra; intellectual honesty, their casualty...

This, I believe, is completely on the nose. The reason Republicans lost so badly in 2008 wasn't because the Democrats and liberals are great---far from the truth, as we can clearly see with our current administration and Democrat majority. Washington is still broken. No, Republicans didn't lose due to their competition; Republicans lost because of themselves. One thing Americans hate, hate, is hypocrisy. And when Republicans talk about conservativism, less government, fiscal responsibility, and then use their majority to do the opposite, America reacts. And that is why we currently have a Democratically controlled, well, everything.

Pitts continues on why the Tea Parties really haven't accomplished a lot in the last year:

...the tea party movement [was found] to be amorphous and largely without
an organizing principle other than its anger toward government and fear of a
supposedly imminent dictatorship. Beyond that, partiers are an unwieldy amalgam
of tax haters, global warming holdouts, illegal-immigration protesters,
secessionists, gun rights advocates, white supremacists, militia types and
conspiracy theorists, all banging their gongs at the same time. Like the liberal
noisemakers who follow the World Trade Organization around, their lack of
message discipline renders them -- that word, yet again -- incoherent. Like
them, they have yet to figure out that to protest everything is to
protest nothing.

Make no mistake: every movement or marginalized people has its fringe
extremists who threaten to define the whole. Thus, moderate American Muslims are
periodically required to rebuke Islamic terrorists, environmentalists are
obligated to rebuff eco-terrorists, and moderate African-Americans are expected
to reprove Louis Farrakhan.

But conservatives, outside of a few integrity-driven souls over the years,
have not rushed to repudiate the crazies among them, even as the crazies have
grown crazier and threatened to engulf the whole.

And here he is right. We need to continue to repudiate, as Erick Erickson has done, the crazier parts. Otherwise, the fringe of the tea party will take over the tea party, and the tea party will, in turn, define the Republican Party. And that would be disastrous for the party, and the for the country.

Crossposted at Republican United

Tea Party Series: How the GOP can use the tea parties and why

For the last six to eight months, the Democrats have been placing their hopes in the tea parties. Yes, I said the Democrats. They have placed their hope that the tea partiers, or "tea-baggers," as they've derisively labelled them, will redeem everything wrong with them, that the Nazi-sign wielding right-wing extremists would make the GOP look so bad that all the mistakes of the current administration would be dwarfed by the ineptitude of the opposition. And at first, they were right.

But the tea party crowd, and the Republican Party itself, may just be beginning to learn from its mistakes. The oft-predicted bloody GOP civil war hasn't materialized. In fact, there are many groups working to unify the GOP's progressive, centrist, and right-wing conservative factions, such as Republicans United and David Frum's Frum Forum. There seems to be less in-fighting than last year, as if the GOP is actually starting to listen to the Big Tent speak. Look no further for evidence than the recent Scott Brown victory; a Progressive Republican by all accounts-he even describes himself as fiscally conservative yet is a social moderate. And not only did he get GOP backing, he won in a traditionally all dem state. And the tea partiers did not get upset that a moderate won-quite the opposite in fact. In Sarah Palin's keynote address at the tea party convention, she said that "...in many ways Scott Brown represents what this beautiful movement is all about..."

In a syndicated op-ed piece, The Potent Tea Party, Rich Lowry writes:

If the tea partiers were to split from the GOP, or be spurned by it, that
would indeed spell disaster for Republicans. It's an unlikely prospect, though.
In a survey for the National Review Institute, pollster John McLaughlin found
that tea-party activists and their sympathizers self-identify as Republicans,
and 68 percent of them voted for John McCain. They are pro-life, pro-tax cuts
and pro-defense -- in other words, mainstream conservatives who are particularly
engaged by the debt-fueled growth of government.

Palin's rapturously received speech in Nashville could have been delivered
almost line for line at a Republican Convention. She skipped the social issues,
but otherwise rehearsed unalloyed conservative orthodoxy on national-security
and fiscal issues. This is not the stuff of ideological fissure or
self-immolation.

Any activist-driven movement will inevitably have rough edges. The
Nashville convention itself was beset by feuding among tea-party groups and
allegations of profiteering for its extravagant $550 admission price. It gave a
platform to ranters Tom Tancredo, a former Republican congressman, and Joe
Farah, editor of a right-wing Web site, both of whom predictably delivered
cringe-inducing screeds.

But such embarrassments are a trifle compared with the enthusiasm of the
tea partiers, and their populist-tinged purifying impulse. They want to
reconnect the GOP to the people, to its principles and to an ideal of public
service that got obscured in the decadent latter days of its congressional
majority.

Tom Tancredo gave a terrible speech, and was rightfully called out by Meghan McCain when she said "...I'm sorry [but] revolutions start with young people. Not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can't say the word 'vote' in English. It's ridiculous..."

And she is right. Speeches like Tancredo's, and in fact speakers like Tancredo, should be scorned by the tea party and the GOP itself. The way to really start winning again is to continue to embrace the "big-tent" ideal that Reagan spoke of in the '80's; by embracing our brothers and sisters that are more progressive than us, and also those that are more conservative than us, so that we can, together, reconnect the GOP to the people.

Crossposted at Republicans United