By Tim Dunkin
One of the most consistent refrains heard within the Tea Party movement is that it should remain independent, that it should not allow itself to be co-opted. The entity against which this warning is sounded, the one that the Tea Partiers fear will subvert the purity and autonomy of their movement, is the Republican Party. Certainly, this fear is understandable. Having seen the Republican “leadership” in action over the past decade, I and many other conservatives are less than confident in the ability – or even the desire – of the GOP leadership caste to represent and advance conservative principles. Even though it has been recently revealed that current RNC chairman Michael Steele, in his new book, recognizes the fact that the GOP strayed from its core principles after Reagan left office (even singling out the two Bushes who served presidential terms), this admission appears to be a day late and a dollar short, especially given Mr. Steele’s own complicity in this drift from principle. Yes, in this sense, the Tea Parties have a point – who wants Mike Steele, John McCain, or Lindsey Graham trying to horn in on their popularity and ruin their image?
However, this is not the hijacking that I want to warn against today.
Let me begin by laying out some basic information. The Tea Party movement is nothing new. Instead, it is the reawakening of latent conservatism that has been there all along, but which entered a period of complacency and disengagement with the political process over the last decade. Some conservatives - having elected “our” President in 2000 (even though he wasn’t all that conservative) and having kept “our” Congress through the rough years of 2000-2004 (even though it was growing less and less conservative) – simply decided to ride their laurels, and got caught by voter backlash. Others, frustrated by the “big-government conservatism” of Bush and his complaint Republican Congress, decided to sit it out completely. This happened in 2006, and the GOP lost Congress big. It happened again in 2008, and cost the RINOish McCain the White House. However, the overt radicalism of Congress and the President over the past year has served to wake up conservatives and motivate them to get back into the political arena. The Tea Party movement is the vehicle through which much of this activism and involvement is taking place.
Another important piece of data that I will use in just a moment is the fact, as recently observed by Rasmussen, that 56% of conservatives consider themselves Republicans. While some might focus on the obvious fact that many conservatives have left the Republican Party, we should also consider what this number also means, which is that an outright majority of conservatives in this country are still registered Republicans. There are more conservatives who are Republicans than there are conservatives who are independents, Third Partyists, and even Democrats combined.
That is significant when we now consider that there are elements out there trying to hijack the Tea Party movement to use it as a vehicle for Third Partyism. Take, for example, the new “Tea Party Party” that has been registered in Florida by an Orlando attorney named Fred O’Neal. The essential idea behind this new Third Party is to recruit fiscally conservative candidates to run against both Democrats and Republicans in elections. Based upon past discussions I’ve had with other folks who are pushing for the creation of a “Tea Party Party”, this will be the case even when the Republican in the race is a solid conservative.
This is a monumentally poor idea, one which is practically guaranteed to allow liberal Democrats to stay in power so that they can continue to advance their radical agenda.
Indeed, one gets the sense that this is the plan. Fred O’Neal, before registering this new Party, was a registered Democrat. He even admits that up until registering this new party, he had not had any involvement in the Tea Party movement. In other words, he’s a complete outsider to the movement, who just suddenly appeared on the scene out of nowhere to start up a “conservative third party.” That smells like a hijacking. Though he professes to have voted for Ronald Reagan – who knows? The secret ballot means that his voting history is completely unverifiable. All that we do know is that he was a Democrat until he decided the time was right to start a Party that seems engineered to split the conservative vote. That is, after all, what happens when conservative third parties get into elections. While having an extremely poor record for actually getting their candidates elected, these third parties – and the same will be the case with a new “Tea Party Party” – have proven very good at taking close races away from Republicans and giving them to Democrats. To their credit, the local Tea Party activists in Florida are distancing themselves from O’Neal’s effort and speaking out against it.
Even when a third party run isn’t pursued under such suspicious circumstances, they still present the obvious problem of splitting conservatives’ votes – something that can do great damage to the Republic in the long run. Case in point, the special election in Massachusetts to determine who will replace Ted Kennedy. In normal political times, no Republican of any sort would have any chance at all of winning this election. For over a decade, no Republican came within 30 points of beating either Kennedy or Kerry for either of Massachusetts' Senate seats. Yet, this year, Republican candidate Scott Brown – a relative unknown running against Martha Coakley, the state’s powerful attorney general – is a mere nine points behind in this race. Sources on the ground there suggest that when only voters who identified themselves as “very likely” to vote are considered, it narrows to a two point race – well within the statistical margin of error for just about any poll. Campaign personnel say that this race will depend heavily on turnout – if conservatives come out heavily for Brown, there is the possibility that he may just pull off an upset in this race.
That would be excellent, since Brown is not your typical wishy-washy Northeastern liberal Republican. Though he’s likely not a “red-meat” conservative such as we would see from Alabama or Idaho, he nevertheless stands against Obamacare, against more porkulus spending, against cap-n-trade, and for fiscal responsibility. If he wins, he will be the critical 41st Republican vote, eliminating the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority and helping to put the brakes on the Democrats’ radical income-redistribution and liberty-thieving plans.
However, Coakley is not Brown’s only opponent. Also in the race is Joe Kennedy, a Libertarian who is also running as the “Tea Party Candidate.” Wonderful. Though he is only currently polling about 1%, in a special election race in which general turnout will be low, every single vote counts that much more. Brown needs every anti-statist vote he can get to even have a shot at winning this. Yet, we have a “Tea Party Candidate” in the race who is no better on these important issues than the Republican. When it comes to Porkulus or Obamacare, Kennedy is basically a clone of Brown. A clone who could steal enough votes away to hand the race to Coakley. A clone who could end up subverting his own ideological position by running in this race, handing the Democrats back their filibuster-proof majority and their license to spend your and my (and his) hard-earned money.
There has to be a better way.
And there is. That better way is for the Tea Party movement to court rank-and-file Republicans – you know, the folks at the county level, the grassroots folks who do the legwork, who are conservative, and who think their Party’s leadership is out of touch with them and with conservative principles – and to work with conservatives within the Republican Party from the precinct level up. Above, I argued that the Tea Party movement is really just the reawakening of conservative activism that had gone dormant for several years. I also pointed out that the majority of self-described conservatives are still registered Republicans. This means that the natural home for conservative activism is in the grassroots of the Republican Party, rather than as an independent movement, or some third party. The GOP already has the organization and the personnel available to provide the vehicle for the Tea Party movement to ride to victory.
Lest one be tempted to argue against this based upon the results of a recent poll showing that more Americans would prefer a generic Tea Party candidate than a Republican one, keep in mind that the Democrats beat them both. But, the two together outweighed the generic Democrat support. When a Tea Party candidate and a Republican candidate both run, they each lose, the Democrat wins. When the Republican candidate IS a de facto Tea Party candidate, however, there should be no reason why he or she cannot win in all but the most extreme left-leaning districts.
So, what to do? Well, the Tea Party movement needs to hijack the Republican Party – which wouldn’t really be a takeover since the majority of Republicans are already conservatives who sympathize with the small-government, fiscal responsibility positions of the Tea Party movement anywise. In a sense, this combination of conservative Republicans and independents would amount to the multiplication of conservative force in the political scene.
All that’s needed is to formalize the affair by eliminating the current high-level Republican leadership – people like Mike Steele, John Cornyn (who heads the NRCC), and Rob Jesmer (who heads the NRSC). These are the folks who tried to foist off Dede Scozzafava onto NY-23, even though she was radically out of step with Republicans in that district and was so far to the left that the Democrat seemed conservative by comparison. These are the political hacks who are currently withholding NRSC funds from conservative Scott Brown’s senatorial race – even though this election is probably the single most important one that has taken place since November 2008. Mike Steele just told the world that he “doesn’t know if the GOP is ready to lead.” This from the national chairman of the Party. Clearly, if Mike Steele doesn’t know this, then he needs to be replaced by somebody who does, and who will fight for conservative principles.
Conservatives need to take the GOP back for conservatism. That means conservatives within the Party and conservatives without. Conservatives need to get involved at the county level, since that’s where it starts. When you take over the county GOP apparatus, then you get to decide who fills the state- and district-level positions. And when you do that, then you get to decide who fills the national-level positions. Along the way, you make as much noise and you agitate and you do whatever you have to do to drive out the RINOs and the squishes, the people who won’t stand for conservative principles, and who in many cases actively oppose those principles. Are you one of those pessimistic “Republicans can do no right” types who think that this can’t be done? Then how do you explain the fact that it apparently just happened in Florida, where the state GOP chairman and long-time ally of Charlie “Chargin’ RINO” Crist was forced out by conservatives and insurgent supporters of Marco Rubio, Crist’s conservative opponent in the Republican senatorial primary later this year? Likewise, though the move was more symbolic than anything else, Lindsey Graham, South Carolina’s disappointingly RINOish Senator, was censured by the Lexington County, SC GOP for his support for amnesty, cap-n-trade, and bailouts, the second county apparatus in that state to do so in as many months. If Graham were smart, he wouldn’t brush that off lightly.
The Tea Party movement needs the Republican Party, and the Republican Party needs the Tea Party movement. Without the invigorating force of the Tea Parties, the GOP seems destined to continue on its slow and painful oblivion. By driving away Republicans, the Tea Parties lose over half the conservatives out there who could support them financially and with their labor, as well as a ready-made organizational vehicle for the advancement of their agenda. The Tea Partiers can play a vital role in helping conservatives in the GOP take their party back – therefore, what I’m advocating is not the submission of the Tea Parties to a GOP ran by the likes of Graham or Steele. It is the unification of conservatives who love their country, want to keep their freedom, are opposed to the radicalism of the Democrats in Washington, and who want to see this country brought back to where she ought to be.
This will not happen, however, if the Tea Parties try to become their own third party – to become just one of over 60 others currently in existence – or allow themselves to be hijacked by individuals or groups who would like to use them to split conservative votes with the Republican Party, thereby handing the Democrats a persisting path to electoral supremacy. One doesn’t have to be one of these slicked-back, bonded-toothed Washington-insider politicos to have the savvy to realize that splitting conservative votes between two different Parties is a recipe for electoral and ideological suicide. Conservatives need to unite – to support conservatives in Republican primaries, to oust RINOs from positions of leadership, to advance the conservative principles that we all hold dear.
