Christine O’Donnell may or may not be electable. She certainly has her eccentricities and defects. But what’s distasteful about the Delaware candidate for U.S. Senate has little to do with the Tea Party. Sexual abstinence is not a pillar of the movement; nor are suspicious lawsuits or conspiracy mongering.
The very reason O’Donnell is attracting attention is because she’s an aberration and not an exemplar. If the Tea Party were made up of nothing but Christine O’Donnells, it would not have produced a Tupperware party’s worth of turnout at a single event. Yet the movement caught fire among America’s working class and reshaped the political landscape in about a year. It befuddled the liberal establishment because it could not easily be pegged as crazy, misguided, or inauthentic.
The mainstream media’s objection to the Tea Party was aesthetic. For all the concern about how America was wary of a presidential candidate with a funny name and a different appearance, the small-town bearings of the Tea Partiers had the open-minded elites packing their bags for Canada.
But Nancy Pelosi and the liberal media couldn’t wage an effective campaign of destruction on aesthetic grounds. Now, with O’Donnell, they think they have the substance to move forward. We see article after article about the Tea Party as a conservative Frankenstein’s monster. But despite the left’s best efforts, that’s an insignificant red-herring subplot, not the central political narrative.
What is most significant is that small-government, anti-elite, anti-tax sentiment is so strong that an apparent oddball candidate was not enough to dissuade conservatives of their passion for reform. A library’s worth of opinion pieces cannot reverse the reality described in this story from today’s New York Times:
The Democrats will depend on labor unions — the shock troops of their political campaigns — to offset two new developments this election cycle: Tea Party enthusiasm and corporations’ ability to spend unlimited amounts thanks to a Supreme Court ruling.
Labor leaders, alarmed at a possible Republican takeover of one or both Houses of Congress, promise to devote a record amount of money and manpower to helping Democrats stave off disaster. But political analysts, and union leaders themselves, say that their efforts may not be enough because union members, like other important parts of the Democratic base, are not feeling particularly enthusiastic about the party — a reality that, in turn, further dampens the Democrats’ chances of holding onto their Congressional majorities.
Christine O’Donnell’s eccentricities will not impact the thinking of America’s private-sector union members. Individual laborers who hear in Tea Party principles the articulation of their own concrete grievances may perilously weaken union support for Democrats. I wonder if many Republicans will consider losing a Senate election in one state too high a price to pay for undermining labor’s allegiance to the Democratic Party nationwide.
