It's Barry O's world, we just live in it.

[wal_lace]

A friend of mine was worried that, if Obama won this year, then in 2016 his successor could be facing a full-on Tea Party candidate

Comments

[sabra_n]

The Tea Party absolutely hurt the Republican Party's Senate chances by eliminating relatively moderate candidates in the primaries and bringing on the kind of whakadoo rape apologists that no one wanted to see in office. There's more room for, uh, whakadoo tendencies in the House, but way, way less in the Presidency. And Presidential primary voters tend to be conscious of that, I think, which is why Mitt "a position for every occasion" Romney ended up winning his party's nomination.

So basically, I think the Tea Party is stronger the more local a race gets. Their effect gets moderated by the existence of lots and lots of non-Tea Party people the more you expand the jurisdiction in question. I guess the Republicans could dig deeper and deeper in, insist to themselves that the problem was that Romney wasn't conservative enough or maybe his campaign wasn't run well enough or maybe Sandy gave Obama a magical unfair boost. They do have a tendency to disregard reality. But it won't last forever. How long is really, really hard to say when

[likeadeuce]

I think the entrenchment of the 2 party system in the U.S. (and, as Sabra says above, the localization of so much politics) makes this a little trickier here. I don't think we can really talk about the extreme right being marginalized as long as they have so much influence in the House. And as long as the looney-right House is such a powerful force in politics, what genuine moderate* is going to WANT to run as the Republican candidate?

*or, as one UK blogger I saw put it, "pro-corporate non-insane person", as the American choice right now is basically pro-corporate insane people vs. pro-corporate non-insane people.