By Noah Kidron-Style
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| From left to right: Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Ron Paul |
On February 19th, 2009, Rick Santelli’s rant against the banking bailout went viral across the Internet. By the end of the month it had fostered the Tea Party movement, a nationwide grassroots campaign calling for low taxation, dramatic cuts to spending and a literal reading of the American Constitution. It smashed the mainstream Republican Party, sparking a rhetorical desire for outsider politicians and filling the House of Representatives with new anti-establishment Tea Party candidates at the 2010 mid term elections.
Yet with the Iowa caucus just under a month away, the Republican Primary has turned into a two horse race involving two of the grand old men of the GOP. The true Tea Party candidates have fallen by the wayside in an extraordinary election campaign that has seen a rotating door of candidates try, and fail to unsaddle frontrunner Mitt Romney. Palin, Bachman and Perry all came and went before in a final bid of desperation the Tea Party summoned up the ultimate anti-establishment candidate in Herman Cain. Cain has never held a political position in his life; instead talks of his experience gained as the CEO of Godfather’s Pizza.
When Cain’s campaign spluttered to an end amidst allegations of sexual assault and adultery, commentators waited to see who would gain most from Cain’s fall. Few expected it to be Newt Gingrich. As the Huffington Post put it “Gingrich’s campaign still looks an awful lot like a book tour.” In comparison to Cain, Gingrich is the ultimate Washington insider. He was the speaker of the House of Representatives where he is best known for allowing the federal government to shut down in 1996, his failed attempt to have Clinton impeached for perjury and for being fined $300,000 for violating the Congresses ethics code. Despite the majority of his senior aids resigning in June this year, Gingrich has fought his way back to take the lead in both local and national polls.
Romney is a corporate insider. With a personal fortune of over $170 million made as CEO of Bain Capital and Bain&Co he is far cry from the fiscal hawkishness of the Tea Party. Last week he angered many middle class Republicans when he offered Rick Perry a $10,000 bet during a debate. It was widely seen as making Romney look totally out of touch, not hard for a man who made his money in the now discredited financial sector.
So why has the Tea Party failed? Some blame must be put on the Tea Party candidates. Mistakes cost Rick Perry who managed to forget which three agencies of federal government he wished to axe during a live TV debate, while Cain had to quit after allegations of repeated sexual harassment. Congressional Republicans haven’t helped either. The radical Tea Party intake of the 2010 midterms has put Congress into deadlock. Their ideologically fueled intransigents has put them at loggerheads with the White House and placed the USA perilously close to shutting down the government (for the first time since Gingrich was speaker).
The role of the twenty-four hours news media only adds to the problem. Gingrich and Romney aside, the rise to the top of opinion polls has always been accompanied by a similar rise in name recognition polling. This suggests that once the news decided that a candidate was on a mini surge, they would increase coverage of that candidate providing free advertising and rocketing previously unheard of people, like Herman Cain, to the forefront of voter’s minds. Once the novelty wore off and the networks streamlined their coverage, the candidates would move back down the polls and another would take their place.
Maybe this is it and the next president will be either Romney, a man most Republicans don’t want, or Newt Gingrich, a man whose own campaign staff thought had too much baggage. Or the conveyor belt of candidates could continue with Ron Paul, the intellectual godfather of the Tea Party who has the most conservative voting record of anyone in Congress since 1937. Or perhaps common sense will prevail and Obama will get reelected for the Democrats, one can only hope.
