Drinking the Kool-Aid Tea

In what may be the most egregious kowtow of a major political party to a political nonentity in at least recent American history, Michael Steele, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, met on Tuesday with members of Tea Party WDC, maybe the most formally established manifestation of the series of ad hoc conservative protesters and extremist malcontents that have rallied under the Tea Party banner for nearly a year.

Steele reportedly huddled with about 50 Tea Party leaders for more than four hours, discussing their angles of attack on the Obama White House, what Republicans and Tea Partiers have in common, and what they don’t have in common, in the runup to the 2010 midterms.

“The chairman believes it is extremely important to listen to this significant grassroots movement and work to find common ground in order to elect officials that will protect these principles,” RNC spokesperson Katie Wright said Tuesday to The Washington Post, offering an olive branch the size of a tree to the cohort of American conservatives that could, maybe, be a force in November.

We may be months away from a political scenario once thought improbable but more and more likely all the time, a variation on the storyline of “King of Hearts,” the 1966 Philipe de Broca film that posits what happens when the inmates run the asylum, and the town it’s located in.

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The devil and the details are inseparable. Even as the Tea Party makes its mainstream move (a unifying flag-bedecked logo, spokesmen with titles), it’s forced to come to grips with issues that have complicated its existence from the jump.

Credibility has been a problem for the Tea Party set. To this point, the TP’s followers have been characterized by a noisy intolerance that traffics in the symbols of don’t-tread-on-me populism married to silly exercises of self-identification (Tea Party members walked around last April wearing tea bags) and virulent intolerance (others carried signs that equated President Obama with Hitler).

To now, it’s been an orange-pekoe protest whose buffoonery contained just enough extremist rhetoric to make it something to take at least semi-seriously. But it’s hardly enough to suggest it could be a political game-changer for the broad cross-section of Americans who vote.

Another problem for the Tea Party (really, stemming from the first one) has to do with the fraud of its genesis. When the first large-scale Tea Party protests began last April 15, in demonstrations from Oak Harbor, Wash., to Sag Harbor, N.Y., they were heralded as the bellwether of a new grassroots, bottom-up movement in America.

The facts were something else again: A parade of K Street lobbyists and government insiders like former House Majority Leader Dick Armey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich were instrumental in sparking and bankrolling the protests; and Fox News, the conservatives’ media arm, broadcast the Tea Bag Day rallies from various places around the country.

It’s impossible to believe that the fingerprints of such conservative powers could have disappeared from the movement in less than a year. The populist thrust of this movement was blunted from the start, and still is, by the involvement of the same government and corporate insiders the movement was meant to protest against in the first place.

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What’s the Tea Party’s reason for being? From the start, most people couldn’t see much difference between the bullet-point credo of the Tea Partiers and that of the Republicans. Even today, Americans still can’t find daylight between their mutual positions. The GOP and the Tea Partiers are in lock step on major issues like tax cuts, smaller government and the disturbingly imprecise notion of “returning to American values."

With no substantive differences in their basic philosophy, then, the TP movement is faced with a question: What can it hope to do in Washington that the GOP can’t do with more resources, more lobbyists, more like-minded partisans already on Capitol Hill? Carving out a distinction when there’s not much distinction is a huge challenge if you define yourself as an independent grassroots political insurgency — like the Tea Partiers do.

That’s what the Tea Partiers have tried to do: articulate distinctions between themselves and the Republicans; they’re doing what they can to make their claim of independence stick. “We're not a function of the Republican party,” one D.C. Tea Party member said last April, and said for a damn good reason. Implicit in that statement is an inescapable fact: If the Tea Party finds common cause with the Republicans, the Tea Party has absolutely no reason to exist.