Now the Tea Party has really done it

By Steve Kornaki in Salon

Republicans in Delaware faced a very simple choice in Tuesday’s primary: Did they want to win Joe Biden’s old Senate seat in November, or did they want to lose it?

They went with the latter option, and if that really surprises you, then you haven’t been paying close enough attention to Republican Party politics in the age of Obama.

The 2008 election, the second straight election in which it suffered a crippling national defeat, left the Republican Party drained of its hangers-on — less ideological voters who had, in the past, broadly agreed with the party’s philosophy, even if they dissented on individual issues. What was left was an angry, restive base that resented (and even feared) Barack Obama and that believed the GOP had lost power because it hadn’t been conservative enough. This base quickly found a catchy name — the Tea Party movement — and dedicated itself to cleansing from the GOP’s ranks politicians who reminded them of the party’s pre-2008 spirit.

It was the Tea Party  movement that compelled Arlen Specter, a 30-year Republican senator, to switch parties in 2009. It was the Tea Party movement that sent Charlie Crist, Florida’s Republican governor and a man who was considered a potential V.P. nominee in 2008, fleeing. It was this movement that knocked off Robert Bennett, a three-term senator from Utah, at a party convention in May; that lifted the son of Ron Paul to the Republican nomination for the Senate from Kentucky; that elevated a shady former healthcare executive to the gubernatorial nomination in Florida; and that replaced Lisa Murkowski, an incumbent senator and the daughter of one of Alaska’s most prominent politicians, with little-known Joe Miller.

And it was the Tea Party that tonight engineered its crowning feat (so far) of 2010: The utterly improbable victory of Christine O’Donnell, a right-wing gadfly and serial debtor who has equated lust with adultery and claimed that her political opponents follow her home at night and hide in the bushes, over Mike Castle in Delaware’s Republican Senate primary