Wild, Wacky Wingnuts

They call us wacky. They call us wingnuts. We call us we the people,” crooned the bewitching Delaware Republican senatorial candidate Christine O’Donnell at the 2010 Values Voters Summit days after her upset victory in the GOP Delaware Senate primary. I give “they” some credit: O’Donnell is indeed a wacky wingnut. But that doesn’t mean those that voted for her are.

In the national haste to make some sort of sense of the Tea Party movement, the greatest mistake is to paint all those affiliated with it as identical. The candidates certainly are not and the voters even less so.

The first faulty premise is that those voting for Tea Party candidates do so because of the views that their candidates espouse. The further to the right the candidate, the more passionate the voters become, we’re told. The chattering class rushes to warn the GOP: Watch out, the crazies are taking over.

Matthew Dowd, President Bush’s political guru, in a recent article for National Journal attempted to debunk a few “myths” of politics. One myth, he says, is that voters vote for policy. Instead, he explains, voters look for qualities like “compassion, strength, empathy, and authenticity.” Want proof? The president was elected because he talked of “hope” and “change.” The last president was elected because voters wanted “to have a beer with” him. No, policy views are not the primary reason we elect our national officials.

Although the movement is ostensibly all about taxes—“Tea” being short for “Taxed Enough Already”—its supporters are not promoting a policy manifesto. They’re looking for some security, sense, and direction. They’re looking for some stability in an unstable time; the fact that they’ve turned to some potentially mentally unstable candidates for stability just makes for nice irony.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, the liberal stalwart, sharply criticized the president early this month for having “no vision.” His fellow left-leaning New York Times columnist Tom Friedman says that this is “the worst communicating White House” that he has ever seen. Even if the administration had a coherent economic agenda, the American public would never know it. And so it feels increasingly adrift in a sea of uncertainty.

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and the candidates that she has coronated rally their troops with calls for “commonsense constitutional conservatives.” There is little hint of policy views in that phrase. But it has stuck. It means something to the voter. It symbolizes the type of certainty and stability that the administration and those in Congress—Democrats and Republicans—have failed to project.

Recent polling by the Associated Press says the vast majority of Americans are “somewhat confident” at best in Congress, the government, and the media. American institutions are growing increasing unreliable in the eyes of the public. And so many are seeking a new source of reliability. The Constitution represents that sort of reliability. Voters trust it not because they find the governing philosophy so moving; they trust it because it is authentic and unchanging.

Likewise, in a time of economic uncertainty made exceptionally more uncertain for consumers and for businesses by the White House’s missteps, voters have sought to find certainty where they have not before. They have sought to find candidates that are principled to replace those now seen as unprincipled. It matters not so much what they believe but rather that they can be believed.

And to the degree that voters do seek starkly right-of-center views, it is to counterbalance the leftward drift of the country. At its core, America is right-of-center. Gallup polling the last two decades shows conservatives outnumbering liberals by almost two-to-one. So to move it back to that fulcrum, the electorate must overcompensate to strike a balance.

The second incorrect premise is that the Tea Party is monolithically crazy. And indeed, some of the Tea Party identified candidates are out of the political mainstream. Nevada Republican Senate candidate Sharron Angle’s “second amendment solutions” to government excess took the prize in political absurdity until O’Donnell’s bizarre statements on years old “Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher” episodes surfaced.

Odd they may be, but among the Tea Party Senate candidates—O’Donnell, Angle, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Joe Miller of Alaska, Ken Buck of Colorado, and so on—there is a surprising diversity. O’Donnell’s support for morality codes contrasts starkly with Rand Paul’s staunch civil libertarianism. While Angle is neither erudite nor exceptionally academic, Alaska’s Joe Miller is a Yale Law School graduate.

And among the Tea Party faithful—at least those in my small hometown—the only commonality of those self-proclaimed patriots is that they are concerned and, well, quite normal. They are the small-business owners around the town square. They are doctors and lawyers, upper-class and lower-class. They are engaged in local politics and choosing for the first time to be politically active. They are not the crazies on the fringe.

The GOP’s problem for the next election cycle is not that fringe voters are voting for the first time. Nor is it that voters demand candidates on the fringe. The problem for the party is that the type of candidates voters demand—authentic, empathetic, and offering certainty—happens only to be on the fringe. The wild “wacky wingnut” voter takeover will happen if and only if that does not change.

Mark A. Isaacson ’11 is a government concentrator in Kirkland House.