Delusional tea partiers see themselves as election scapegoats

Sharon Angle. Todd Akin. Richard Mourdock. Christine O’Donnell.

Akin

Maybe the tea party leaders have already forgotten those names. Those candidates represent four easily winnable Senate seats that the Republicans lost over the last two election cycles directly due to the tea party nominees’ “nuttiness,” as RedState’s Erick Erickson might say.

Yet, the tea party loyalists seem to believe that they have been scapegoated by the GOP establishment and that their movement is still a major force in general election politics.
Here’s the lead-in for a piece published by The Washington Times:

“Tea party leaders say they refuse to be the scapegoats for the drubbing Republicans took on Election Day, claiming it was the party establishment -- not their insurgent movement -- that cost the party seats in the House and Senate and returned President Obama to the White House.

In fact, various branches of the grassroots movement vow to reassert themselves on the local and nation levels as Congress begins talks aimed at averting the ‘fiscal cliff.’ They say their call for limited government is more relevant than ever before.”

Am I missing something? Isn’t it the tea party that’s adamantly opposed to a “grand bargain” or a “balanced approach” to the nation’s fiscal mess? Aren’t these the same people who are determined to defeat any immigration reform bill?

Sounds like the GOP is saddled with more internal problems than they thought, if they want to respond to voters who are fed up with partisan gridlock.

“As far as the tea party is concerned, we are still here,” said Amy Kremer, leader of the Tea Party Express, told the Times. “We may not be out on the streets with the colorful signs like 2010, but we are here, we are engaged and we are going to continue to fight. We never thought this was a short-term process. It is going to take a long time to turn it around.”

Do these people need reminding already about the November election outcome? One of the tea partiers’ most outspoken advocates, Rep. Allen West of Florida, lost his bid for re-election, while Rep. Michele Bachmann, after running a weak presidential campaign as a founder of the congressional Tea Party Caucus, barely scraped by to keep her Minnesota seat.

One of the fatal wounds suffered by the Mitt Romney campaign was when he was caught on camera saying the bottom 47 percent are people who don’t want to work and expect to live off the government. In mainstream politics, that was considered a damaging gaffe. In tea party world, the 47 percent comment is widely accepted as true.

Yet, here’s where we’re at as the congressional lame duck session unfolds:

Judson Phillips, head of Tea Party Nation, said the tea party’s first order of business is to rebut Republicans who want to blame the movement for their poor performance at the ballot box.

“They went well out of their way to ignore us, marginalize us and pretend we did not exist,” Phillips said, taking particular aim at Karl Rove, the architect of President George W. Bush and founder of American Crossroads, a super PAC that spent more than $100 million in the campaign but had few successes to show for it. “And they gave us the most liberal nominee in the history of the Republican Party.”

It appears to me that a political group that calls itself the tea party should have a better grasp of political history than that displayed by their top leadership.