Christine O’Donnell‘s Tea Party-fueled victory over the seemingly safe establishment figure Mike Castle in Delaware is prompting no shortage of chin-stroking among the punditry, all wondering what this development, coming on the heels of all the other victories Tea Party candidates have had over Republican mainstays in GOP intra-party rumbles, is apt to mean for the future of the Republican Party. And I must say, the prospect of presidential candidacy of a Tea Party-fueled Sarah Palin running against Old Guarders Mitt Romney and Mitch Daniels does seem to offer a juicy bit of theater.
But here’s the question I have: what will the Tea Party mean for the Democrats? Remember Newton‘s Law (one of ’em, anyway): a body at rest tends to stay at rest. Right now, the Democratic Party is a party at rest, chained by the countervailing forces of being in power but also being gripped by internal contradictions (it wants to get out of Afghanistan but it’s responsible for Afghanistan; it wants to stimulate the economy but it doesn’t want any more deficits; it wants to reform the banking system but it doesn’t want to reform it too much.) It’s hard enough to hold all these divisions together when you’re winning; it’s impossible if you lose. Yes, right now, the Democratic Party is a party at rest, but it’s about to get punted into the middle of next week.
Will we not see a Tea Party on the left? The Tea Party is fueled by anger. The Obama administration never ever succeeded in becoming a vehicle for the rage that followed the economic crisis; perhaps this is because Obama is preternaturally incapable of being a vehicle for rage. By not being the vehicle for the rage, that left him the object of the rage, at least on the right, where Obama became the owner of the bank bailouts, and then quickly became the big government owner of a stimulus plan, a health care plan, and so on.
The anger on the left, however, was tempered by an allegiance to Obama, the One We’ve Been waiting For, the Bringer of Victories. Once he brings defeats, however, he and the rest of the Democratic establishment are going to get challenged. Make no mistake, the senators who couldn’t end Too Big To Fail, who couldn’t deliver a Single Payer System, who might not be able to end the Bush tax cuts on hedge fund billionaires, will all be challenged by candidates of the left. And they will be figuring to tap into a lot of pent-up anger. Remember how furious people were about the AIG bonuses? Do you think that has gone away?
Replacing Congress’s contented cows with angry people on both sides of the aisle might not be a bad thing. Could it provide an opening for an assault on big money politics?