Another excellent analysis of the Tea Party movement by William Voegeli at the Claremont Institute. Please note the swipe at Frum below. (HT Julie Ponzi at the Ashbrook Center)
A sample:
There are three kinds of failure, Joseph Epstein wrote in Ambition:
“not reaching high enough, overreaching, wanting courage.” One of the
Tea Party movement’s central convictions is that most of the modern
Republican Party’s failures result from excessive timidity, not
excessive audacity. As a result, it has generally taken a
big-risk/big-reward approach to selecting Republican nominees.Against
the potential loss of the Delaware senate seat, the polling data argues
there will be some clear successes from this fortune-favors-the-bold
attitude. The risk-averse view of the 2010 midterms called for
Pennsylvania’s Republicans to put up with Arlen Specter’s intermittent
party loyalty, and Florida’s to accept the somewhat conservative
Governor Charlie Crist as the safest bet for its Senate seat. Instead,
after driving Crist out of the Republican primary, Marco Rubio holds a
9.8% point lead in the Florida senate race, according to the Real Clear
Politics average, and is given a 78% chance to win by Silver. Toomey
and Rubio will be far more conservative senators than Specter and Crist.It
is better, Frum wrote after Specter joined the Democrats, “for
conservatives to have 60% sway within a majority party than to have
100% control of a minority party. And until and unless there is an
honored place made in the Republican Party for people who think like
Arlen Specter, we will remain a minority party.”Whatever else the Tea Party movement means and intends, its disdain for
this 60%-of-a-loaf strategy is apparent. The bromide that politics is
the art of compromise encompasses the lesson that the political arts
include knowing when not to compromise.
