Tea Party Favorites in U.S. Senate Races

Angle called her opponent, Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid, "desperate" in his bid to remain in office and help preserve the Democrats' majority. In an interview at a Northeast Washington hotel, she claimed that her critics are using tactics of the late radical community organizer Saul Alinsky to try to discredit her.

"I think it's right out of Saul Alinsky's rulebook for radicals, those rules about your opponents," she said of criticism that her views put her far out of the political mainstream. "Marginalize them. That means push off as far to the side as you can. Isolate them. Make it appear that they're the only one thinking the way they do. And then demonize them. Make it look like their ideas are way out of the realm of thinking folks."

Instead, she argued, it is the tea party movement that best represents mainstream America. The country is "nostalgic," she said, for a return to Reagan Republicanism. "It's mainstream America that's finally awakened, and it really doesn't have anything to do with party so much as the [constitutional] principles," she said. "There's an anxiety level, I guess, just among mainstream America that we may not be able to preserve those principles if we don't get active."

The Buckley rule

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, September 17, 2010

You don't stop that agenda by nominating an O'Donnell in Delaware and turning a Senate seat from safe Republican to safe Democratic.

If DeMint and Palin want to show that helping O'Donnell over the top -- she won late and by six points -- wasn't a capricious spreading of fairy dust, perhaps they should go to Delaware now and get her elected to the Senate.

You made it possible. Now make it happen. I would be happy to be proved wrong about O'Donnell's electability -- I want Republicans to win that 51st seat. Stay in Delaware and show us you were right. The beaches are said to be lovely in the fall

He said that in the end, it doesn't matter what polls say, pundits try to intimate or how much money you have. All that counts is if you have more votes than the other person.

And he's dead right.

That's why Democrats shouldn't see Tea Party candidates such as O'Donnell, Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada as a firewall to keep them in power. What they should be doing is having a laser-like focus on their core supporters and driving them to the polls.

If they want to cast the Tea Partiers as out of the mainstream, go right ahead. I don't think that will work for a second. What will matter is that voters are, in the words of the late comedian Robin Harris, are "pissed off to the highest level of pissivity."

Making fun of us and/or our champions just pisses us off more.

hawkeye10 wrote:

Making fun of us and/or our champions just pisses us off more.

[...] as mr orwell once said, all politicians are ridiculous fools, but some are more ridiculous and foolish than others[...]

Eleven years ago a boisterous Christine O'Donnell confessed to Bill Maher and his ABC audience that she'd dated a witch, "dabbled into witchcraft" and even went on a midnight date involving blood on an altar.