NOT EVERYONE STAYED for TEA

“America can rise up and surmount [its] problems,” cried Rand Paul, newly elected Senator for Kentucky, “if we just get government out of our way”. And there you have the battle lines of American politics – and indeed of British politics – in a nutshell.

Rand Paul is the son of Ron Paul who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Don’t discount Paul Jr – who, I imagine, was named for Ayn Rand – doing the same in 2016 if not 2012. He thinks he’s good. What’s more, so does the Tea Party.

Rand Paul: perhaps his appeal will pall

As the smoke clears from the US mid-term elections, it seems that the Tea Party didn’t do quite so well as they had hoped and everyone else feared. None of the jackasses whose pictures I included in my posting of September 17th (No Pipe of Peace for the Tea P) actually got elected, though to be sure Sarah Palin, the godmother of the movement, wasn’t standing. It’s bracing to imagine how much influence my little blog must have had on American voting patterns. And it’s curiously comforting to note that California was indifferent to Meg Whitman’s billions, just as New York State shunned Carl Paladino’s threats.

Sharron from an unflattering angle

Neither was it entirely the big night predicted for Palin’s ‘Mama Grizzlies’. All bets were on Sharron Angle unseating the Democrat leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, in Nevada, but the disturbing (and possibly disturbed) Ms Angle, who evidently believes that Hispanics are Muslim, was pretty comfortably seen off. In fact, Harry Reid’s son Rory had dropped his surname from ads in his campaign to become state governor and maybe sufficient of the voters thought this unfilial enough to tip the vote against him.

Harry Reid: not a broken reed after all

Also in the west, Carly Fiorina failed to unseat the long-serving Barbara Boxer from her California Senate berth, giving the Democrats a heartening double-whammy in the state, with the retread Jerry Brown triumphing over Whitman as governor. Fiorina used to be CEO of Hewlett-Packard, in which post she was hailed by the Condé Nast Portfolio website as among “the twenty worst American CEOs of all time”. And of course the plum loco Christine O’Donnell, whom even Republican greybeards warned was unelectable when she defeated a mainstream candidate in nominations for the Delaware Senate seat, proved indeed to be unelectable. We’ve surely heard the last of her.

Carly Fiorina: just one out of twenty

But Republicans took the House and Barack Obama will have to play a canny game with the new hand he is dealt. In my view, he and his party have done themselves no favour by cleaving to the time-honoured Democrat stance of declining to carry the fight to the enemy. The Tea Party have been making the political running long enough that the Democrat strategists have no excuse for failing to put together a telling response. It’s not as if the new force in Washington has been at all subtle or tried to keep the White House guessing. You don’t have to look at Fox News for more than a minute or two to get a purchase on where these people are coming from.

Jerry Brown: running in 1975

The American right has been vocal for a long time and it’s time the left got in on the act. There are two aspects that constrain it from doing so decisively. The first is that thoughtful, liberal people do tend to offer their insights with a certain degree of tentativeness and apology. Even when they’re entertainers at the top of their game, they cannot resist exploring the weaknesses and fallacies of their allies as well as their enemies: see passim Jon Stewart. The second is that, for all the long-standing lies about the “liberal bias” of the media promulgated by Republicans, that media is almost entirely owned by right-wing capitalists. No media outlet and no reporter or columnist therein is allowed to conduct themselves in an equivalent manner to that which Rupert Murdoch has decreed shall be standard on Fox News. The outlandish, unsupported ravings of the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck would never be tolerated if they espoused left-of-centre or even centrist views.

Charles & David Koch: the means to buy power

The same is true in Britain. Simon Heffer, Jeremy Clarkson, Melanie Phillips, Rod Liddle, Richard Littlejohn and the legions of their fellow pub bores may write what they like, no matter whether any of it can be remotely justified. But the very few columnists who may be taken to be of the left – Seamus Milne, say, or George Monbiot – clearly are obliged to step with care. Nothing that isn’t cogently argued and copiously illustrated is allowed to sully their pieces.

So the right gets its rallying cries heard and the resurgent Republicans will pour into Washington determined to force Obama to change course. Their supporters know just what needs to be done. Just get the government out of the way: it sounds so simple and that’s why so many simple people have marched behind that rallying cry. But hey, wasn’t the recession the fault of the banks and the lending houses? And wasn’t it a consensus among all but the anarchist fringe and the supranational squillionaires that the problem with the banks and the lending houses arose because those institutions were under-regulated? Regulation – along with taxes – is just what the post-Tea Party Republicans want to sweep away. They reckon making big bucks is “entrepreneurial”, however illegal the means of making them and however much you keep those bucks to yourself. The Koch brothers who largely fund the Tea Party are among the very richest entrepreneurs in the US. Few enterprises defend more lawsuits than does Koch Industries. The Tea Party followers believe they’re fighting for their own liberty but, much more significantly, they’re in practice fighting for capitalism to be above the law.

Clint Didier: weak argument

Democrats (like the Labour Party in Britain) are more concerned, philosophically and historically, with trying to look after the tired, the poor, the huddled masses of Emma Lazarus’ poem storied on the Statue of Liberty. That means a degree of government action, what many American voters who clearly don’t know the meaning of the term denounce in the Obama administration as “Socialism”. What’s the alternative? Here’s how failed Tea Party candidate for the Republican nomination as Washington state senator Clint Didier framed it: “We’ve got to get rid of this protecting the weak” [his emphasis]. Throw ‘em in the sea, I say.

There will be two more years of Obama before we learn whether he can gain a second term, whether the Republican hierarchy will have held its nose and pitched Sarah Palin against him and if so to what effect. As the Chinese proverb threatens: we are fated to live through interesting times.