The Tea Party: From rebellion to absurdity

WILMINGTON, Del. – The primary here today will determine definitively whether the Tea Party is capable of carrying its rebellion to a truly absurd extreme.

Want to know how angry the state’s Republican leaders are at the campaign of Christine O’Donnell, the perennial candidate who is threatening Rep. Mike Castle in the U.S. Senate race? Here’s what Delaware Republican Party chairman Tom Ross told me last night:

I could buy a parrot and train it to say, ‘tax cuts,’ but at the end of the day, it’s still a parrot, not a conservative.

That, so far, is my favorite line of this election season.

Ross is furious because O’Donnell had no credibility as a candidate until the Tea Party Express, a California-based group, decided to target Castle, a genuine moderate who represents the last vestiges of what was once a thriving and honorable wing of Republicanism. Oh yes, and she also got the endorsements of Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). DeMint is determined to purge his party of anyone with the nerve to be – well, even a moderate conservative.

Ross notes that the state Republican convention endorsed Castle. These are not some shadowy party bosses, but, as he put it, “the grass-roots delegates who knock on the doors and pass out the literature and pound the pavements.”

Ross says he thinks it’s pretty nervy for “some group in Sacramento that doesn’t know our state to come here, destroy our civility, and tell the people of Delaware they know more about our state than we know.”

What’s interesting here is the notion that for all its grass-rootsy talk, the Tea Party is a nationally led and nationally directed movement that is willing to run roughshod over local Republican parties if it finds them to be less than ideologically pure.

The real question will be turnout. Celia Cohen, the political writer for the Delaware Grapevine Web site, notes that turnout in the 2008 Republican primary was 29,000 and it was only 14,000 in 2006. To win, Castle needs something closer to the 2008 turnout, and probably more, since the hard right is almost certain to show up.

The fact that it’s a closed primary deprives Castle of the votes of the many independents and Democrats who have always liked him. Castle’s campaign hopes enough Republicans now understand the political threat to their popular former governor that they’ll show up. The race hangs on whether that’s right.

Few races this year have been more clear-cut on the matter of electability: The polls demonstrate that Castle would be the favorite against a rather strong Democratic candidate, New Castle county executive Chris Coons. By nominating O’Donnell, the Republicans would hand Coons and the Democrats the seat.

Castle, at least, is not in the least bit complacent. “The Tea Party Express, which claims it’s not a political party, is in reality a pretty good political operation,” he said in an interview last night. “This is a more sophisticated political operation than they’ve been given credit for.”

He adds that what’s happening here “goes way beyond this election” -- and that’s entirely true. Democrats may be rooting for O’Donnell because they need all the Senate seats they can get this year. But my hunch is that a lot of them would quietly mourn if Castle, a guy of old-fashioned decency, were to lose. If there is no longer any room for him and people like him in the GOP, it will be the clearest sign yet of a party that has decided to go off the edge.