Tea Party on the march

Victories in the Republican primaries have proven the Tea Party is a new force in the Republican party.

In the primaries leading up to the U.S. November’s mid-term elections, a new political force has emerged. Republican candidates running under the banner of the Tea Party, a far-right grassroots organization nominally led by Sarah Palin, have bested a slew of establishment Republicans. Most notably, Christine O’Donnell, a former abstinence counselor who’s previous claim to fame was appearing on MTV to tell kids that masturbation is a sin, defeated veteran Mike Castle in Delaware this week.

Ross Douthat of the New York Times says O’Donnell’s views are too extreme for Delaware, and she’ll certainly lose to a Democrat come November. However, if her eventual defeat “becomes a cautionary tale about the limits of caring only about ideological purism, then the lessons of Delaware in 2010 might serve the (Republican) party in good stead” come the presidential election in 2012, when the Republicans will have to show greater inclusiveness and unity than they are now.

Establishment Republicans fear that Tea Party candidates are hurting the party’s chances of beating the Democrats, but Peter Worthington in the Toronto Sun says “the Grand Old Party is going to have to make some kind of peace or accommodation with the Tea Party movement if they want to win the 2012 election.” Attempts to “characterize it as a nutty fringe group of evangelicals and rednecks” have failed, and “they and Sarah Palin ain’t going away.”

The Halifax Chronicle Herald’s Bogdan Kipling sees the rise of the Tea Party as a sign of American crisis that echoes the Great Depression. “At both times, deep shifts in the economy, natural disasters and joblessness combined to create a climate of fear,” he writes. FDR alleviated that fear with the New Deal, but Barack Obama hasn’t been able to pull the country out of its tailspin and Americans are looking for salvation from the fringes.

In the Windsor Star, Toby Harnden wonders if Obama is destined to be a one-term president. “Almost everything Obama does these days suggests that he doesn't care much about being re-elected.”

Somewhere, Sarah Palin is picking out drapes for the Oval Office.