Tag Archives: rino

I know the Tea Partiers can painted as right-wing extremists, but could they be saving the “moderate” wing of the GOP as well? Reihan Salam (one of my favourite new writers on the right) had a great piece in the Daily Beast, and I offer this as food for thought…

So what happened? It’s not just elderly activists at Tea Parties who’ve come to reject President Obama’s approach to economic governance. Many of the college-educated middle-age voters who backed the president in 2008 have turned against him in the intervening months. As the right has focused more narrowly on the growing spending burden and the future tax increases it necessitates, at least some voters who had turned away from the GOP on cultural grounds are giving the party a second chance…

If large numbers of Republicans outside of the South and the Mountain West win seats in 2010, particularly suburban swing seats, there will be a built-in constituency for a more pragmatic brand of center-right politics. The Tea Party could pave the way for a more inclusive political movement that embraces the same fiscal conservatism while leaving aside more polarizing cultural messages, as seen in the Scott Brown campaign. This would parallel the evolution of the antiwar movement between 2003 to 2008, from a fringe movement that alienated moderates to a tendency that came to embrace a large majority of the public.