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No doubt GOP voters in Delaware have selected a senate candidate who is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. Today we’ll try to understand how this happened. Pickerhead says better a flake than the bien pensants from the Northeast who have bankrupted the country and tried to destroy our most important alliances. And the cartoonists are having fun with the tea parties.
In WSJ’s Best of the Web, James Taranto posts a Delaware reader’s decision to vote for Christine O’Donnell in the primary.
Reader Dave Beruh writes in response to our column yesterday on the Delaware Senate primary:
…I agonized quite a bit before voting for Christine O’Donnell. My politics (I believe) are similar to yours, I’m an agnostic, and social issues aren’t very important to me, although I would probably be in favor of compromise (civil unions, keeping abortion legal but emphasizing adoption, etc.).
For me Rep. Mike Castle’s cap-and-trade vote was my last-straw moment. …
Toby Harnden writes in the Telegraph, UK, about Christine O’Donnell’s primary win and its wider implications.
…O’Donnell is a party apparatchik’s nightmare. Although attractive and personable – there is a physical as well as a political resemblance to Palin – she is a flawed candidate who will struggle against her Democratic opponent in November’s midterm elections. …
…Yet the point to take from Delaware is that none of this really matters. To say that voters are angry is an understatement. They are furious, disgusted and resentful. They are fed up of being told by besuited party honchos and professional politicians whom they should vote for, and what they should think. …
…So the reaction of establishment figures to O’Donnell’s win was as predictable as it was misguided. Karl Rove, former Svengali to George W Bush, branded her “nutty”. Senate Republicans, who trashed her in the primary campaign, announced they would not fund their new nominee. Rove’s point may be substantively correct, and in terms of allocating the party’s resources, not funding O’Donnell makes some sense. But the response showed an arrogance that will fuel the outrage Republicans should be trying to harness. …
…There are certainly some eccentric characters at Tea Party events, but the vast majority are small-government conservatives who think Washington is corrupt, complacent and working for itself rather than the people. Those feelings have only been exacerbated by President Obama’s policies: elected on a wave of anti-Bush feeling, he interpreted the desire for something different as a mandate for a vast expansion of government, piling trillions on to the already swollen national debt. In Florida the other day, I saw a home-made sign tied to the front gate of a modest home in a black neighbourhood. “No more big plans with my money,” it declared. That’s the essence of the Tea Party message – and it has huge resonance. …
This Corner Post suggests she might do just fine.
“There’s been no witchcraft since. If there was, Karl Rove would be a supporter now,” O’Donnell jokingly assured the crowd.
Toby Harnden also sets the record straight on some of the misinformation being circulated about the Tea Party.
…There’s a glut of commentary and assumptions about the Tea Party and much of it is wrong. Here are some common mistakes:
1. The Tea Party will fade away. Christine O’Donnell’s victory confirms that it is a major electoral force. Many of those involved have not voted before. The movement is growing, not shrinking.
…5. The Tea Party is part of the Republican party. It’s not. Tea partiers are conservatives but they have little interest in simply achieving a Republican Congress. Its ambitions are much bigger than that.
…8. The Tea Party is full of loonies who believe masturbation is evil and dinosaur bones are fake. We’ll see a lot of citations of the “nutty” (K.Rove) opinions of Tea partiers – especially, for the next few days at least, by O’Donnell. But the broader Tea Party has little concern about social issues. It is primarily a low-tax, small-government movement.
…10. The Tea Party is an angry reaction to Obama’s 2008 victory, which was a true realignment of US politics. There was no political realignment in 2008. Obama won because he was anti-Bush and the country was in the mood for a complete change. It was not a mandate for increasing the national debt and growing government. While the Tea Party opposes Obama and all he stands for, it is not especially focussed on him personally. In fact, Congress – Democrats and Republicans – seems more unpopular than Obama among Tea partiers.
Charles Krauthammer tells everyone fed up with government to focus on candidates who can win seats, so Obama and the liberals can be stopped. And he rightly tells Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin to put their money where there mouths are, and start campaigning for O’Donnell in Delaware.
…Bill Buckley — no Mike Castle he — had a rule: Support the most conservative candidate who is electable.
A timeless rule of sober politics, and particularly timely now. This is no ordinary time. And this is no ordinary Democratic administration. It is highly ideological and ambitious. It is determined to use whatever historical window it is granted to change the country structurally, irreversibly. It has already done so with Obamacare and has equally lofty ambitions for energy, education, immigration, taxation, industrial policy and the composition of the Supreme Court. …
In Contentions, Abe Greenwald adds his thoughts.
…The very reason O’Donnell is attracting attention is because she’s an aberration and not an exemplar. If the Tea Party were made up of nothing but Christine O’Donnells, it would not have produced a Tupperware party’s worth of turnout at a single event. Yet the movement caught fire among America’s working class and reshaped the political landscape in about a year. It befuddled the liberal establishment because it could not easily be pegged as crazy, misguided, or inauthentic.
…What is most significant is that small-government, anti-elite, anti-tax sentiment is so strong that an apparent oddball candidate was not enough to dissuade conservatives of their passion for reform. …
And we have some excellent points from J.E. Dyer, in Contentions.
…It’s becoming clear that ObamaCare, cap-and-trade, bank bailouts, private-sector takeovers, czars of the week, and epic deficit spending are more alarming to voters than Ms. O’Donnell’s views on sanctity in private life. As a (relevant) aside, I give most voters credit for understanding that O’Donnell doesn’t propose using the power of the state to enforce on others the particular views for which she has recently gained notoriety. That level of interference in private life is antithetical to the Tea Party demand for smaller government; indeed, under the daily assault of Obama’s energetic regulators, a growing number of voters are associating such intrusiveness explicitly and resentfully with the political left.
But the national electoral dynamic this year isn’t about O’Donnell; it’s about changing course. And in making their choice, the Republican voters in Delaware showed a perfect comprehension many senior conservatives haven’t. A vote for Mike Castle was, in fact, a vote for the status quo. The voters knew what they were voting for — and many of them would have said that the kind of strategic voting urged on them by pundits and political professionals is exactly what has produced the status quo.
…But the people are on the move. George W. Bush said often during the 2004 campaign that the poll that mattered was the one that occurred in the voting booth. In a majority of “voting booth” polls this year, the people have signaled that their dissatisfaction with our current course outweighs everything else. …
In Der Spiegel, Jess Smee highlights various German newspaper editorials on the Tea Party primary wins.
…On Thursday, German editorialists look at what the latest victory means for US politics.
…The business daily Handelsblatt writes:
“Glen Beck, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party are part of an opposition movement outside of Congress which is moving mountains. This is a revolt against ‘Obamaism,’ which is seen as representing big government, more taxes, a higher deficit and not enough ‘Americanism.’ Day by day, it puts more and more pressure onto those at the top.”
“In the US, people … spend time and money supporting the Republicans. Unlike in Germany, in America, which never had a Hitler, being ‘right-wing’ is not taboo. ‘Right-wing’ represents Reagan, religion, the free market, individualism, patriotism and small government. In reality, it is an impossible mixture: National pride, God and tradition are conservative ‘us’ values. The profit motive, competition and a weak state are ‘me-first’ sentiments … . But this mixture of conservative values and neoliberalism works well in America, where it transcends social class — that’s the difference to Germany.” …
David Warren contrasts the Koran non-burning and the 9/11 mosque controversy.
…Here it is worth noting that, for all his flakiness, Jones was willing to stand down. Compare Feisal Abdul Rauf, whose project to build an “Islamic cultural centre” at the edge of Ground Zero in Manhattan is offensive to a large majority of Americans and who has been made vividly aware of that fact. …
But the question for both is: “Why are you doing this?” It applies with greater force to Rauf and associates for they have been assured by almost everyone who is offended that they are welcome to build their centre anywhere else; that the issue is not religious freedom, but location, location, location.
Here we look into the deep well of hypocrisy that feeds all contemporary “progressive” thought — and which Rauf has been happily exploiting by using smooth leftist “rights” jargon in all his public utterances. The “transgressive act” is to be encouraged, imperiously, when one class of people are offended — average Americans in this case. It is to be vilified if another class of people are offended — average Muslims in the Pastor Jones case.
Remember that we are comparing a huge, permanent, symbolic building to a little passing bonfire that did not finally occur. …
Walter Russell Mead, in American Interest.com, sings Wal-Mart’s praises.
…At the risk of forfeiting any remaining elite cred I may have, let me confess: I love Walmart. For years, every time I traveled outside New York, I descended on Walmart stores across the country. Everything in those stores is significantly cheaper than in the hoity-toity New York department stores that want me to pay $9 and up for a “designer” undershirt. For the price of a pair of socks in New York I can get three pairs at the average Walmart.
…As I drove my load of goodies home, I started to feel a surge of Green Guilt: the Great Wastrel staggers home in his gas-guzzling automobile stuffed with Big Box Retail productions — the enemy of everything sustainable. Shouldn’t I be riding a bio-degradable bicycle to the farmer’s market to pick up locally produced heirloom beets and carry them home in my reusable organic burlap shopping sack?
Actually, no. Walmart and its Big Box friends are making the world a greener, more sustainable place. This isn’t because of any PR stunts or corporate green initiatives they may have going; it’s because they are relentlessly focused on profit and efficiency. It is their cutthroat capitalism not their sense of corporate citizenship that will save us — if anything can. …