The GOP and the Marginalization of Anger

The Tea Party is the loudest and angriest group in U.S. politics. After helping Republicans win the House of Representatives in 2010, the movement looked poised to wrest the White House from President Obama in 2012.

But 2012 is here, and the Tea Party’s hopes of finding a sufficiently angry candidate are quickly dissolving.

What happened?

Only a few months ago, there were plenty of candidates expressing Tea Party rage. Michele Bachmann. Rick Perry. Herman Cain.

Bachmann, every tea partier’s ideal of a righteously angry woman, won the Iowa Straw Poll, but fell away when Perry entered the race. Perry – as angry as anyone had been since 1861, angry enough to secede from the Union! – destroyed himself when he told those who oppose college tuition benefits for illegal aliens, “I don’t think you have a heart.”

Herman Cain countered that he would use a fence to electrocute Mexicans, and angry Tea Partiers vaulted him into first place. He was their candidate until he, too, was tripped up by matters of the heart. It was a different kind of heart than Perry’s, of course, involving payments to a woman who was not Cain’s wife.

Step in Newt Gingrich, a seething man who flung his rage at debate moderators Juan Williams and John King. Tea Partiers rewarded Gingrich with a win in the South Carolina primary and front-runner status.

Immediately, the Republican Party started to sober up, realizing that rage would never put it in the White House. Mitt Romney then won the Florida primary. Romney, however, is unacceptable to the Tea Party, because he does not lose his temper, he does not appear motivated by fury, and, worst of all, he governed Massachusetts as a liberal.

So the Tea Party started looking for a true conservative who was just as inoffensive as Romney. They discovered Rick Santorum. The problem with Santorum is that he is as bland as a hot dog bun.

What the Tea Party really wants is an angry man who will bus 11 million illegal aliens to the Mexican border (including those who are not Mexican), after which the buses can round up all of the abortion doctors and take them to death row, after which the buses can be sold off in the dismantling of the federal government.

None of this, of course, is going to happen.

No matter how many headlines the Tea Party was able to win by shouting at congressional town halls across the country in 2009 and 2010, the movement was never more than a rump within the larger rump of the Republican Party, which is a perennially minority party.

That means the only thing worth speculating about is President Obama’s margin of victory in the Electoral College. Whatever that margin will be, it is certain to make a loud minority of Americans extremely, extremely angry.


People also view

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *