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The Tea Party movement attracted a lot of attention.... but it took shape at the very beginning of the Obama presidency. It arose out of widespread libertarian and populist outrage over the federal government’s intervention in the economy. While opposing the Obama administration, the Tea Party movement has remained independent from the Republican Party, sometimes openly confronting the GOP establishment.

The Tea Party movement has repeatedly rebuffed the GOP establishment’s attempts to co-opt it, which has alarmed some Republicans. Richard Parker, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, observed, “The RNC remains concerned about three things: the impact of Tea Party primary challengers on the electability of general election candidates, how Tea Party voters will vote in November, and the potential political damage that negative perception of the Tea Party can cause.”

Rasmussen Reports has found that in three-way contests between Democrats, Republicans, and Tea Party candidates, the anti-Democratic vote is split down the middle. Zernike explained, “Tea Party leaders generally boil their issues down to three things: fiscal responsibility, constitutionally limited government, and free markets.” These issues comprise the core values of fiscal conservatives, and Tea Partiers generally recognize that Republicans are better aligned with their interests than Democrats. Still, there is no doubt that the Republican establishment should be concerned, as it has seen a number of preferred candidates receive strong challenges from the Tea Party movement.

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In the Kentucky Senate primary, the weakness of the party’s national leadership and the double-edged nature of the tea party movement were revealed in full measure as the candidate tapped by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the father of the modern Kentucky GOP, couldn’t come within 20 points of Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning political outsider who won’t even commit to supporting McConnell for leader.

And while Paul’s romp speaks to the energy GOP candidates can derive from tapping into the tea party movement, the quickness with which Democrats pounced on the GOP nominee’s positions on, for example, eliminating the Department of Education and ending farm subsidies illustrates the political risk Republicans take in nominating ideological purists.

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[The Republican Party] underestimated the intensity of their parties' most ideological voters, who want party purity even if it complicates matters this fall. [The Tea Party candidates] will have to find a way to moderate their rhetoric this fall without appearing to moderate their core principles. That can be tricky for first-time candidates, as Paul learned when he publicly questioned the fairness of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

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Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
signing off