The following is an excerpt from the CQ Researcher on "The Tea Party Movement" by Peter Katel, March 19, 2010.
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It remains to be seen whether the Tea Party can foment national political change. 
But some political observers think the movement is well-placed to drive the GOP rightward, especially on economic policy issues. Others say it's a fringe faction that ultimately will lose steam.
One outcome is fairly certain: The Tea Party movement would be seriously undercut if it evolved into a third political party — historically the route taken by new movements that want to broaden the national debate. Most Tea Party activists argue against such a move. “If you create a third party you guarantee that it's going to split Republican votes and guarantee socialist Democrat victories,” says Right Wing News publisher Hawkins. He predicts that the Tea Party instead will effectively take over the GOP.
To be sure, the prevailing view in liberal circles is that the Republican Party has already moved far to the right. Even some senior Republicans are delivering much the same message.
“To those people who are pursuing purity, you'll become a club not a party,” Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told Politico, a Washington-based online newspaper, last November. He spoke following the failed attempt by Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman to win a congressional seat in upstate New York, replacing the Republican incumbent, who was judged by the party establishment as too liberal. (Democrat Bill Owens won the seat.)
“Those people who are trying to embrace conservatism in a thoughtful way that fits the region and the state and the district are going to do well,” Graham said. “Conservatism is an asset. Blind ideology is not.” [Footnote 15]
Some Washington-based conservatives question the possibility that any movement based on political principles can exert deep and lasting influence on the political process, where fulltime participants tend to act as much — or more — from self-interest as from ideology.
A movement that channels itself into a party inevitably suffers the dilution of its ideas, a conservative writer argued during the February panel discussion in Washington organized by the America's Future Foundation. “Politics is a profession, and the temptation, once we're in charge, is to say, ‘We're going to fix everything, we're going to solve everything,’ not realizing that people involved in these parties are human beings and susceptible to compromise,” said Kelly Jane Torrance, literary editor of the Washington-based American Conservative magazine.
The absence of a Tea Party institutional presence makes its absorption by professional politicians inevitable, she added. “People seem to need a charismatic leader or organizer or an institution, which is why I think the movement is basically being eaten up by the Republican Party,” she said.
But some Tea Party activists argue that promoting their ideas within the GOP is essential if the movement is to avoid being marginalized. “There's got to be communication with the political party establishment,” says Karin Hoffman, a veteran Republican activist from Lighthouse Point, Fla. “The Democratic Party has done everything to ridicule the movement,” she says, while the GOP platform “matches what the grassroots movement feels.”
Hoffman orchestrated a Washington meeting this February between 50 Tea Party-affiliated activists and Republican Chairman Steele. Hoffman says she's on guard against the danger of Tea Party activists becoming nothing more than Republican auxiliaries.
“I've not been happy with how Republicans have behaved,” she says, citing the reduced-price system for prescription drugs under Medicare that President Bush pushed through in 2003. “We don't need an increase in government.”
Disillusionment with Bush is commonplace among tea partiers, who tend to have been Bush voters in 2000 and 2004. The shift in their support — or, alternatively, their view that he abandoned principles they thought he shared with them — underscores the potential obstacles to reshaping national parties. “Even with a relatively diffuse organization, they can have influence just because of visibility, and can pull conventions and rallies,” says Sides of George Washington University. “But that's not a recipe for transformational change.”
Sides cites the history of the Club for Growth, an organization of economic conservatives that rates lawmakers on their votes on taxes, spending and related issues. “No one would say that the Club for Growth has been able to remake the Republican Party,” Sides says, “but it has exerted influence in certain races.”
Republican consultant and blogger Soren Dayton disputes that view. “If you look at the electoral and policy successes of the conservative movement — look at the Republican Party,” Dayton said at the America's Future Foundation event. “Abortion, guns and taxes are settled issues. If you're an activist on these issues, the point is actually changing the minds of Democrats.”
The reason for that ideological victory is easy to identify, Soren said. “We're winning these [electoral] fights on the ground because the Republican Party is solid — because it's been taken over in certain significant ways by conservatives.”
The Issues
* Does the Tea Party represent only a narrow segment of the population?
* Will the Tea Party movement reshape the Republican Party?
* Does the Tea Party attract conspiracy theorists?
For more information see the CQ Researcher report on "The Tea Party Movement" [subscription required] or purchase the CQ Researcher PDF.
Footnotes:
[15] Quoted in Manu Raju, “Lindsey Graham warns GOP against going too far right,” Politico, Nov. 4, 2009.
Will the Tea Party movement reshape the Republican Party?
Future of the GOP
by Alan Greenblatt, March 20, 2009
Can Republicans stage a comeback?
Last November’s sweeping election of Barack Obama and further losses in Congress presented Republicans with their worst defeat in more than a decade. Republicans recognize that they are at a low ebb but believe they still have a firm foundation for success. Congressional Republicans have decided to oppose Obama’s spending proposals, rather than trying to collaborate in a bipartisan fashion. They believe a clear statement of core party principles – lower taxes and limited government – will still be popular. Others aren’t convinced, arguing that the party must adapt to challenges it faces among minorities, the young and voters outside the South. 
Other parties have snapped back quickly from similar losses, but some predict that Republicans face a long period in the political wilderness. Meanwhile, it’s not clear who speaks for the party – the congressional leadership, potential presidential aspirants such as Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, or even radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh.
* Is America a center-right nation?
* Can Republicans appeal to minorities and the young?
* Is the GOP a national party?
Overview from the CQ Researcher on the Future of the GOP
As Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell is arguably the nation’s most powerful Republican. When he addressed the Republican National Committee (RNC) on Jan. 29, the Kentucky senator spoke of grim news for his party.
“Over the past two elections, we’ve lost 13 Senate seats and 51 House seats,” McConnell said. “Our most reliable voters are in decline as a percentage of the overall vote, and Democratic voter registration is on the rise.”
After Democratic Sen. Barack Obama’s historic victory last November, Republicans are now the clear minority party, and some say they could be in danger of staying in the political wilderness for a long time.
It’s tempting for Republicans to blame their problems on President George W. Bush, who left office with a 22 percent approval rating – the lowest since Gallup began polling more than 70 years ago. The litany of Bush failures is familiar: The Iraq War, now in its seventh year; the administration’s abysmal response to New Orleans’ needs during Hurricane Katrina; corruption scandals that cost the GOP support even among the party faithful.
Finally, Republicans were blamed for the fiscal crisis that erupted last September. “The economic meltdown had a profound effect on this election,” veteran Republican consultant Tony Fabrizio said in a radio interview two days after Election Day.
The result was a Democratic sweep, with Obama carrying states that had been solidly Republican for decades and racking up the largest popular vote of any Democrat since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Having lost their congressional majorities in 2006, Republicans saw their numbers slip further in 2008.
William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, says, “Republicans were certainly hurt by the economy, but if the economy had stayed normal, they would have been hurt terrifically by the changes in geography of President Bush and his brand of Republicanism.” Frey’s point: The GOP has become largely identified with conservative social issues popular in the South and risks becoming a regional party appealing primarily to the South, parts of the Mountain West and the Great Plains.
Republicans last fall were shut out on the coasts and lost the suburbs for the first time since 1996. “As Republicans, we know that commonsense, conservative principles aren’t regional,” McConnell told the RNC. “But I think we have to admit that our sales job has been.”
But the party faces other demographic challenges: It is losing ground among minorities and the most educated voters. “The Republican Party is increasingly white, rural and old, in a country that is increasingly less of all those things,” says Jonathan Martin, who covers the party for Politico. “This is now emphatically a minority party in this country.”
Many Republicans would disagree, despite the party’s recent losses. After all, they point out, after Bush’s reelection in 2004 Republicans were talking confidently of building a “permanent majority.” “It was only a few years ago Republicans were thinking they were the natural majority in the country,” says William F. Connelly Jr., a political scientist at Washington and Lee University. “Democrats might not want to operate on that assumption too quickly.”
But Ruy Teixeira, a Democratic analyst and senior fellow at both the left-leaning Century Foundation and the liberal Center for American Progress, says things are different today. “Democrats in 2002 and 2004 still had the demographic wind at their back. Republicans don’t have that. Not only did they get clobbered, not only did they make some mistakes, but the demographic wind is in their face.”
And House Republicans in particular face big disadvantages, says John J. Pitney Jr., a political scientist at California’s Claremont McKenna College. Democrats hold 32 of the 33 House districts in which African-Americans make up 40 percent or more of the population – the only exception being a Louisiana seat where an indicted Democrat was ousted last fall. They also control 31 of the 35 mostly Hispanic seats – all but the four Florida districts dominated by Cuban-Americans, who have long favored Republicans. In addition, Democrats hold all 22 House seats in New England, and all but three of the 29 districts in New York – much of which used to be fertile GOP territory.
While there’s some overlap among those seats, they give Democrats a 103-seat head start toward the 218 needed for a majority. “If Republicans concede these districts, they have to get two-thirds of the rest, which is tough to do,” Pitney says.
Besides problems appealing to minorities and voters in the most populous parts of the country, Republicans have a hard time attracting voters under 30, two-thirds of whom voted for Obama. “People who have come of age during the last decade are the most Democratic population of any cohort,” says Gary Jabobson, a political scientist at the University of California, San Diego. “That might be the most striking legacy of the Bush years in terms of the national, partisan political system.”
Then-Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan in December launched an in-house think tank, the Center for Republican Renewal. “Republicans have grown accustomed to having our party recognized as the ‘Party of Ideas,’ but we must acknowledge that many Americans today believe the party is stale and does not deserve that label,” Duncan wrote in a memo to the RNC.
But he was replaced in January by Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor, who quickly canned the think tank. “I’m trying to avoid the use of words that start with ‘re,’ words like renewal, rebuild, recharge, re-this and re-that,” Steele wrote in a memo to RNC members. “I’m convinced we should not re-anything. Instead, we must stand proudly for the timeless principles our party has always stood for.”
So far, Steele’s argument has carried the day within the party. Republicans say the party lost its way during the Bush years by running up deficits and overspending. They say it needs to return to arguing for lower taxes and limited government.
“Liberalism’s preferred solution to working-class insecurity – making America more like Europe through a vast expansion of the tax-and-transfer state – is still unpopular with most voters,” write conservative authors Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam in their book Grand New Party.
All but three congressional Republicans opposed the $787 billion stimulus package enacted in February. The GOP’s congressional leadership has resisted Obama’s entreaties for bipartisan cooperation to help solve the economic crisis and has actively discouraged members from collaborating with Democrats.
“We will lose on legislation, but we will win the message war every day, and every week, until November 2010,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C. “Our goal is to bring down approval numbers for [Speaker Nancy] Pelosi and for House Democrats. That will take repetition. This is a marathon, not a sprint.”
But so far, public opinion polls suggest Republicans are losing the message war. Obama’s approval ratings are much higher than the GOP’s, and Americans give him higher marks for dealing with the economy.
While Republicans believe they have regained their footing with a back-to-basics message on taxes and the size of government, some people say they are not reading the mood of the moment, when many Americans are looking to Washington for action in response to the economic crisis.
And while the party’s base seems content with that message, it’s not clear who speaks for the party – the congressional leadership, potential presidential aspirants such as Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, or even radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. A recent Rasmussen survey found that 68 percent of Republicans say their party lacks a clear leader.
Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana was considered the party’s leading new star but stumbled in his first big national appearance. Although Jindal’s performance giving the Republican Party’s official response to President Obama’s Feb. 24 address to Congress was widely panned – both by liberals angered by its message and conservatives unhappy with his style – Jindal is still considered a comer in GOP circles. The former Rhodes scholar is known to be highly intelligent and has won praise through his efforts to reform Medicaid. Also, Jindal is just 37 – giving him plenty of time to make a comeback on the national stage after a weak initial outing.
Steele has sought to fill the party’s void, making near-constant media appearances. But even some RNC members have complained that he has stumbled repeatedly in his early days as titular head of the party. Two months into his tenure, however, Steele began to cut back on his media appearances in the wake of an interview with GQ in which he expressed support for abortion rights. Steele denied that that was his position. But his need to clarify a number of his public statements led party activists to say he should concentrate on the nuts-and-bolts work of rebuilding the party, such as fundraising and appointing key staff.
Asked about Steele’s performance on CNN’s “The Situation Room” on March 4, Nicolle Wallace, a former top adviser to Bush and Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, said, “At the beginning of ‘American Idol,’ there are a lot of singers and a lot of them are pretty terrible and that’s where the Republican Party is right now.
“We’re at the beginning of our season,” Wallace continued. “By the time the Republican Party has to stand before voters again, we’ll have our act together.”
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In the news: Senate passes D.C. Voting Rights Bill
On February 26, 2009, the Senate passed a bill providing full voting representation in the House of Representatives for residents of the nation's capital, nearly ensuring that the measure will become law. The measure would increase membership in the House from 435 to 437, adding a seat from the District of Columbia and also one from Utah. The Western seat was added to help attract Republican support and because officials contended that the state was deprived of an additional congressional district through and undercount in the 2000 Census. The House has yet to take up the measure this session but is certain to repeat its passage of the bill in previous years. President Obama has indicated his support for giving the District of Columbia voting representation.
