Did the Tea Party doom the GOP?

[parafly]

Originally Posted by Trades

Are they or is the problem how they are presented in the media?

Have you gone to a tea party rally? I have, and it is not what the media portrays. Unlike the Occupy morons the tea party actually has ideas and a plan.

Cut everything and threaten the fiscal solvency of the United States is not media portrayal, it's reality and suicide.

Face it, the social crazies hijacked a movement with good intentions.

[freestater]

Originally Posted by HessStation

Nevermind I misread OP.

The Tea Party was GREAT in theory unfortunately blemished by socially retarded conservatives. The liberal media attacked the **** out this and turned an economic movement into something ugly.

Originally Posted by Winstonbiggs

The tea party didn't doom the Republican party, the social right wing of the Republican party doomed the tea party.

This is correct. I was involved with fiscally conservative politics when a bunch of us realized Bush 2 was just a right wing big govt guy. We started a group locally called People over Politics NY. Before too long, we had a protestant minister trying to co-opt the whole thing, demanding that the only way forward was with Jay-Sus! One of my best friends in the outfit didn't take too kindly and we all dropped out. The social-cons had taken over and we we're marginalized. Not until the (R)s decide it's the fiscal conservatives they need and not the bible-thumpers, they're doomed to lose and lose and lose.

[quantum]

Originally Posted by Winstonbiggs

The tea party didn't doom the Republican party, the social right wing of the Republican party doomed the tea party.

Agreed. too many religious nuts, crazy opinions on rape, etc.

[freestater]

Originally Posted by quantum

Agreed. too many religious nuts, crazy opinions on rape, etc.

stop cooking the books. cap the spending. end the FED.

after that....

[Timmy®]

Originally Posted by DDNYjets

I can't make any excuses for Michelle Bachman. She is an abomination.

However Sarah Palin was a victim of a liberal media assassination. She is nowhere near as bad as people make her out to be. The perception about her is completely wrong. Reps gets blame for this too. She was going a good job in Alaska before they chose her as a Hail Mary for the McCain campaign. She wasn't ready.

She'd make a good stewardess for Air Alaska, I'll give her that. I'd lean into her if I was in the aisle seat and she was handing the person next to me a ginger ale.

[detjetsfan]

Originally Posted by Winstonbiggs

The tea party didn't doom the Republican party, the social right wing of the Republican party doomed the tea party.

And to pretend like there isn't an enormous amount of overlap between the Tea Party and the Culture War republicans would be naive.

If Romney wasn't forced to embrace the radical social agenda of the Tea Party he would have won the election. Women are not voting for a anti-abortion candidate even if he hoodwinks them like "I'm really just a moderate".

[Jungle Shift Jet]

Originally Posted by DDNYjets

I can't make any excuses for Michelle Bachman. She is an abomination.

However Sarah Palin was a victim of a liberal media assassination. She is nowhere near as bad as people make her out to be. The perception about her is completely wrong. Reps gets blame for this too. She was going a good job in Alaska before they chose her as a Hail Mary for the McCain campaign. She wasn't ready.

Yeah, just like the ZERO accomplishment B. Hussein was "ready"...

[Jungle Shift Jet]

Originally Posted by quantum

Agreed. too many religious nuts, crazy opinions on rape, etc.

Incorrect, the 2 idiots who made stupid statements deserved to lose, however its not endemic to the GOP and (unlike the case of Lousyberg replacing Torricelli at the 11th hr in NJ) therent arent provisions everywhere to kick compromised nominees off ballots and replace them. In fact in Akins state MO and others there is a "sore loser" law that prevents runnersup from doing so.

But "religious nuts"? You sound like a lib now, so sad.

[Ernie]

Originally Posted by Timmy®

She'd make a good stewardess for Air Alaska, I'll give her that. I'd lean into her if I was in the aisle seat and she was handing the person next to me a ginger ale.

And yet the Republicans are against women.

[DDNYjets]

Originally Posted by Jungle Shift Jet

Yeah, just like the ZERO accomplishment B. Hussein was "ready"...

I agree with you.

[DDNYjets]

Originally Posted by Ernie

And yet the Republicans are against women.

Its OK. He is allowed to say that. He is a liberal. They are on the "same team" as women so it is different.

[Jungle Shift Jet]

Originally Posted by DDNYjets

I agree with you.

Any moderate to very successful Governor from any party is a viable candidate due to that executive experience, it's a microcosm of the Federal government.

Not that I'm a Palin fan at all (i'm not but prefer her to Plugs and the rat-eared anti-American commie any day) Palin was a rising star who although relatively inexperienced was seen as a threat due to her potential to attract those with lady parts (even confused libs with artificially sculpted ones) and had to be completely obliterated via all outlets of the media ("Special Weekday Edition(s) of SNL" dedicated to ridiculing her)

Sure, the "I'll try to find you some and I'll bring them to you"statement re MCain's regulatory policies was weak, the fictional "I can see Russia from my house" that is now "real" in lib lore was pure BS.

Too bad no one in the MSM ever before or in the future will challenge B. Hussein like that.

[Trades]

Seems to address the OP well. Read the bolded paragraph if nothing else.

The Taming of the Tea Party

Jesse Walker|Nov. 8, 2012 4:30 pm


When you're listing the losers of this election cycle—not just on Tuesday but all year—be sure to include the Tea Party movement. You might have missed the sustained beating it took throughout the campaign, given how hard the Democrats worked to paint the Romney/Ryan ticket as a tricorne-wearing Godzilla lurching toward a helpless village. But consider this sequence of events:


• A wave of weak candidates—Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry—attracted a Tea Party following and then imploded. The only one of these who ever had a credible path to the nomination was Perry, and he blew it with one of the most cringe-inducing debate meltdowns in campaign history.


• Desperate to prevent Mitt Romney, the etch-a-sketching architect of Obamacare, from taking the nomination, Tea Partiers found themselves voting for Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, two men closely associated with the Republican "revolution" of 1994—and, more important, with the descent of the Congress thus elected into heavy spending and corporate cronyism. When the Tea Party movement began, its activists saw themselves as rebels against the Republican establishment; they had little good to say about what the GOP Congress had become. Now many of them were falling in behind Gingrich, the man who launched that Congress, and Santorum, a player in the corporatist K Street Project.


• Romney got the nomination. At the convention, his camp pushed through rule changes that greatly strengthened the party chiefs at the expense of local activists, making future insurgencies less likely to succeed. The Tea Partiers got the conservatives' usual consolation prize, the vice presidential nomination, with Paul Ryan inserted into the role previously played by Sarah Palin, Jack Kemp, and Dan Quayle. He immediately began to revise his positions where they conflicted with Romney's.


• Romney moved to the center. The Tea Partiers held their tongue. Now that the election is over, groups like the Tea Party Patriots are calling Romney a "weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment." But as the campaign concluded, the fear of Obama kept them mum.


• Obama won anyway.


Everyone understands that the last item on that list represents a defeat for the Tea Party platform, but it isn't as widely appreciated how much the earlier steps in the process were losses too. Yes, it means something that people like Gingrich and Santorum and Romney had to give Tea Party fans the rhetoric they wanted. Part of exercising political pressure, after all, is extracting promises from people who disagree with you. But promises, particularly in presidential primaries, often turn out to be lip service, something the left discovered when it thought it was electing an opponent of the national security state. It's certainly hard to believe—to bring up a scenario that both Republicans and Democrats invoked to get their voters to the polls—that a President Romney would have expended much effort trying to repeal Obama's health care legislation, or that he would have been able to get such a bill past the Democratic Senate if he'd tried.


There's more to the Tea Parties than a presidential race, of course, and there may be many more primary challenges and Tax Day protests to come. But the only element of the movement that's coming out of this week with many reasons to be happy is the one that never did fall in en masse behind Romney.


The Tea Party crowd had a complicated relationship with Ron Paul's supporters, and some of the latter would deny the Tea Party label. Others claim to be the original, uncorrupted Tea Party insurgency. Either way, they had a pretty good night on Tuesday. The Ron Paul Republican Justin Amash was reelected to Congress in Michigan, as were Paul's longtime allies Jimmy Duncan of Tennessee and Walter Jones of North Carolina; three anti-war, anti–PATRIOT Act, pro-legalization Republicans—Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ted Yoho of Florida, and Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan—were elected for the first time. In the Senate, Paul's son Rand will be joined by the Paul-backed candidate Ted Cruz, who doesn't look as libertarian as the new blood in the House but does seem more anti-statist than the modal Senate Republican. The most Paulian presidential candidate on the November ballot, Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party, won over a million votes, a rare level of support for any third-party candidate and the highest raw total the LP has ever achieved.


The fact that I'm citing a million-vote showing as an impressive precedent is a sign that these people aren't really playing for presidential stakes. Not at the moment, anyway. But this is, at the very least, a trend worth watching. The constitutionalist caucus may be small, but unlike the broader Tea Party movement it has some momentum on its side.


http://reason.com/archives/2012/11/0...ea-party/print