All In

Rand Paul in Kentucky. Sharon Angle in Nevada. Maes in Colorado. Murkowski in Alaska. The list goes on and on. Now O’Donnell in Delaware and Paladino in New York. Time and again, Tea Party candidates are capturing Republican nominations in statewide elections – and as often as not, turning safe Republican seats into tossups, or worse. In Delaware, for instance, the Democrats are projecting to hold the Senate seat and pick up the House seat of Mike Castle, the presumptive GOP nominee before tonight.

This is a bet. If this works out, the Democrats may yet take their 747 with three engines on fire and fly it through the hurricane to land on the aircraft carrier. If it doesn’t, the GOP will take the reins in Congress with the most radical right-wing rank and file since the Civil War. This is a dream scenario for the Ds in their darkest hour – but if they botch it, it will be a train wreck.

Now there are those who say “yay, put the Tea Party in control for two years and people will see how radical they are and the Republicans will be ruined forever!” These are the same sort of people who voted for Nader in 2000 and then tried to rationalize it while shitting themselves. If it would be a disaster for your opponent to win, you had better fucking win.

This was inevitable, to be honest. The GOP has been in the hands of the South for quite some time. “Tea Party” is just a label the base assumed because “Republican” was a toxic brand in the post-Bush era and “Confederate” might be a little too honest for electoral success. But don’t think for a second that the people you see waving WWF-style signs at Glenn Beck rallies are outside the mainstream of the GOP – that’s the most reliable base the Republicans have, the last-ditch dead-enders, the ones who talk endlessly about how the President is a Muslim (largely because the N-bomb remains over the line in politics), and – most importantly – the ones who are convinced that they are the last platoon desperately holding the line against the Mexican Muslim Homosocialist onslaught. Which means that their support will gravitate to the kind of no-retreat no-surrender candidates who will never ever ever compromise with The Enemy.

Take it, Charlie Pierce:

Seriously now, [O’Donnell] was a crackpot when she rose on primary morning, and she’s a crackpot now, and she will be a crackpot whether she wins or loses in November. She no more belongs in the Senate of the United States today than she did the day she was born. That 30,000-odd primates in Delaware thinks she belongs there is their problem. If enough people in Delaware come to think so, then she becomes our problem.

O’Donnell is a creature of an age in which politics have no meaning beyond performance art. She is the Creature From The Green Room, with no apparent public career beyond being available whenever some teenage booker from the cable shows needed someone to say something reliably stupid. She is one of those people who’d show up at CNN with a waterbowl in her teeth if someone there blew a dog whistle.

Her resume is so thin as to be opaque, and a lot of it seems to be a lie. She seems to be something of a deadbeat, and “U.S. Senator” seems to be her idea of an entry-level position. This morning, she stands one step away from the job.

She is what politics produces when you divorce politics from government. She is what you get when you sell to the country that nothing government can do will help, and that the government is an alien thing, and that politics is nothing more than the active public display of impotent grievance.

She is what politics produces when you turn them into a game show and the coverage of them over to a generation of high-technology racetrack touts. She is what you get when political journalism reduces politics to numbers on a scoreboard, divorcing them from the real world consequences of what are increasingly seen as cute little eccentric decisions…