Michael Barone‘s latest article for the Washington Examiner offers his assessment of the potential long-term impact of Tea Party activists.
In terms of their immediate effect on conventional politics and their potential for continued influence, I think the tea partiers bear an uncanny resemblance to the antiwar activists in the Vietnam War period.
Like the tea partiers, the antiwar folk did not start off affiliated with one political party. They campaigned against an incumbent Democratic president and his political heir in 1968. Four years later some supported Rep. Pete McCloskey’s antiwar primary challenge to Richard Nixon. The tea partiers have plenty of corrosive things to say about the Republican politicians of the last decade and at least some of them may support like-minded Democrats.
But if they stay involved, the tea partiers are likely to gravitate to the Republican Party, just as the antiwar folk gravitated to the Democratic Party, on which they had a long-lasting and pervasive effect.
