tea party
What (some) Trump supporters were thinking—and feeling
A Berkeley academic empathizes with antigovernment Louisianans.
David Brat, the anti-experts' expert
Last week college economics professor David Brat trounced House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the Republican primary for Virginia's seventh congressional district. Prognosticators thought that Brat, a favorite of Tea Party supporters, was a long shot. How could he win? Hadn’t the Tea Party been on the wane? Now, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson warns, the Tea Party “should no longer be thought of as just a faction of the GOP. It’s calling the shots.”
What's clear is that Tea Party voters turn out in droves and care passionately about politics. Many of those Teapublicans are also fervent Christians of the evangelical stripe.
Cantor's fall and the Tea Party dialectic
The swift and unexpected political demise of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) at the hands of his own party’s primary electorate last night has already called forth endless analysis. Beaten by an economics professor who ran on a shoestring and whose major source of institutional support came from talk radio hosts, Cantor has been charged variously with focusing too much on preparing to be the next House speaker, with running an ineffective campaign that spent no money on voter contact but $200,000 on steakhouses, with being too soft on immigrants (Cantor proposed a path to legal status for immigrants brought into the country illegally as children), and with being too negative and unfair in his campaign ads. There is even speculation that Cantor was defeated by Democrats voting in Virginia’s open primary.
Whatever the mix of factors, the primary defeat of a House majority leader—something that has apparently never happened in the 115-year history of that office—indicates a politician, and a party, caught sleeping by a restless electorate.
Courage to compromise
Richard Lugar symbolizes something great but fragile about the American system of government: it relies on partisanship tempered by wisdom.
Post-Wobegon politics: Michele Bachmann and the moral recession
Michele Bachmann's frontrunner moment may be past. But she has shown how the Republicans can win in the restless small towns of the swing-state Midwest.
Reactive mood
The glory of American politics is that voters get to "throw the rascals
out"—whether or not they understand who the rascals are or the nature
of the crisis the nation is in. Very little could have done by any
government during this worldwide economic slowdown to address the high
unemployment, except more government stimulus, which is what voters say
they don't want.
