Teabaggers More Popular Than GOP

This is an interesting development. People like the teabaggers more than they like Republicans. Here's Politico:

Should the “Tea Party” movement organize itself to run congressional candidates across the country, it would poll better than the Republican Party, according to a new survey by Rasmussen Reports.

In the national telephone poll of 1,000 likely voters released Monday, 23 percent said they preferred to vote for a candidate from the yet unformed “Tea Party” for Congress in 2010. The Republican Party trailed the non-existent political organization by 5 percentage points, getting the support of 18 percent of respondents.

Democratic candidates were preferred of 36 percent.

Local tea party organizations have sprung up in states across the country, but there is little national – or even state-level – cohesion among them. Most states have several groups competing for support. 'Tea party' polls better than GOP

The Tea Party movement is a kind of interesting phenomenon. It is not made up of politically astute or particularly involved individuals -- you might have seen the Sarah Palin book-signing video, where people love Sarah Palin but don't have any clue what her position on domestic or foreign policies might be. People just have an idea that they're fed up, they don't really have any better idea how to manage a country of three hundred million extremely diverse citizens in a world of fickle friends and enemies, but they know "we want our country back."

The Republican Party built its foundation on the unlikely alliance of wealthy capitalists and working-class white people, where the working people were persuaded to prefer policies that were bad for them. Eight years of Bush presidency embarrassed the whole bunch of them, of course the rich got richer and the poor got poorer as expected, but the in-betweens began to realize, dimly, that their needs were not being met. Now that America has elected an African-American as President, their revulsion is gelling into a movement that has no real leaders, no doctrine, it is an aggregation of people who feel that their values and their ways are better than other people's, and they feel that they are being left out while elites and minorities get all the goodies. They are suspicious of government, suspicious of scientists and academics, suspicious of foreigners and people who are not white, suspicious of people who are not heterosexual and who are not stereotypical in their gender behavior. They see themselves as normal people and believe that's how everybody should be.

This is what you get after decades of second-rate education, after eight years of an anti-intellectual Presidency, where you had a President who mocked the PhD's who worked for him and claimed to make decisions "from the gut" rather than using his brain. Bush was the perfect teabagger President, though nobody will ever want to claim him. We tried it, it didn't work.

Bush was a Republican, and you can distance yourself from his failure by ... starting a new party that's just the same, but with a different name.

Despite the disorganization, the tea party brand is strong enough that a number of conservative candidates, including Republican California Senate hopeful Chuck DeVore, have tried to adopt the movement’s message.

According to the poll, 41 percent of all respondents said they had a “favorable view” of the so-called “Tea Party,” while only 22 percent characterized their view of the grassroots anti-tax movement as “unfavorable.” Thirty-seven percent said they were unsure.

Seventy percent of Republicans said they had a favorable view.

Fifty-seven percent said they were following news about the new movement either “very” or “somewhat” closely, while 40 percent said they were watching “not very closely” or “not at all.”

It will be interesting to see if these people can organize themselves into a political movement with any real power. This CNN story suggests that it might fall apart before it gets itself together...

It emerged in anger and it threatens to split in anger.

One major group in the Tea Party movement -- named after the famous Boston Tea Party -- is set to host its first convention in February, with former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin as its keynote speaker.

But there are fractures in the movement that threaten its future. And if history's any guide, such movements tend to flame out.

The Tea Party movement erupted on April 15 -- tax day -- over criticism of President Obama's economic policies and what organizers called big government out of control. The movement, made up of local, state and national groups, continues to protest what it considers fiscally unsound policies.

And the movement is well funded. Action groups like FreedomWorks -- chaired by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey -- helped organize and fund its April 15 rally in Washington.

Other groups, including Americans for Prosperity, Tea Party Nation and Tea Party Patriots, are also vying for the helm of the movement, and it's creating what some are calling "competitive chaos."

Some Tea Partiers have voiced anger and concern over whether the powerful groups are "astroturfing'' what is supposed to be a grass-roots coalition -- the idea that the movement is being organized by old-fashioned GOP bigwigs to promote their agenda. Tea Party movement threatened by internal rifts

For one thing, the party has no core principle, unless it's opposition to paying taxes, and I just don't see that going anywhere. Yes, government is big, it's inefficient, but it's stable and a country needs governing. Anybody can point to any particular incident of wastefulness, and the government can constantly try to streamline itself, but there's just no way to manage a country this size without redundancy and bureaucracy. Taxes are the price we pay for living in a civilized society, you put in something, you get something back. I understand not enjoying having a big chunk of your paycheck disappear before you see it, sorry, we do enjoy the stability and prosperity that result, we would not enjoy anarchy or the tribalism represented by these primitive groups.

They're fighting among themselves before they get off the ground -- are these the people you want running things?