Jon Stewart and Frank Rich both spent the weekend before the midterms telling us that the Tea Party is really not reality. They tell us it is a mirage created with funhouse mirrors and Koch Brothers’ money. If we could just ignore the media we’d know that the opposition isn’t really a “pumpkin assed forehead eyeball monster” and that they “lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican power.”
We’ll have to wait to see how the elections turn out. Maybe not only the media but the polls have it all wrong. Maybe the primaries were a false sign. Maybe the Tea Party candidates will falter all over the country. Maybe they’ll be co-opted as soon as they get to Washington DC and will turn into well-behaving and sensible legislators like Bob Bennett and Bob Inglis and Lisa Murkowski. That worked out pretty well for us during the Bush years, so what do we have to worry about? Or, maybe, we can’t all get along. Maybe, we won’t be able to “queeze one by one into a mile-long, 30-foot wide tunnel carved underneath a mighty river” because it will turn out that the “selfish jerk(s) who zip up the shoulder and cut in at the last minute” are not so rare and were not scorned, but elected to high office. Maybe the Senate rules are such that the upper chamber cannot function with people like Rand Paul and Sharron Angle and Mike Lee and Joe Miller and Ken Buck joining with the likes of Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn. No one could have predicted that these people would actually carry though with their promises.
The Tea Party isn’t a mirage. It isn’t something that the Trent Lotts of the world can control. If it were, Mike Castle and Charlie Crist would be cruising to election to the U.S. Senate. When you put people in government, particularly when you put them into government with six-year terms, you change that government. Whatever heat-fever of passion put them in there doesn’t break as suddenly as it arose. It stays on. It metastasizes. It eats away at the flesh of its host. In this case, it will paralyze its host, and nothing will get done. We won’t be politely waving each other through as we all go about making the little compromises we make every day just to get to work.
Go out and vote. Vote because Stewart’s happy vision may be inspiring but it ain’t happening. Vote because even if Frank Rich were right that the Tea Party will be co-opted, that only gets us back to the Bush years. Vote because I asked you to while other people told you everything would be okay if you just turn off cable news. It won’t be okay. It won’t be anything remotely resembling okay.
