In 2011, Michele Bachmann delivered an alternative “Tea Party” response to the State of the Union. In 2012, Herman Cain performed that duty. This year, it is Rand Paul’s turn. It’s a strange phenomenon. Bachmann attempted to upstage Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell’s official Republican response, while Cain competed with Paul Ryan. In those cases, you could see the distinction. But, this time, the official response is going to be delivered by Marco Rubio, who is a Tea Party-endorsed politician himself. In other words, Tea Partiers are delivering both the official and the alternative Republican response to the State of the Union speech.
This puts Rubio in the surreal position of being simultaneously claimed and disowned by groups like Tea Party Express.
“We are giving a voice to the tea party movement when the mainstream media and the Republican establishment wants to write us off as dead,” said Amy Kremer, chairman of the Tea Party Express. This is the third year in a row that Kremer’s organization has sponsored the tea party response…
…”We are proud that Marco Rubio is giving the official Republican Party response because he is a tea party conservative and one of our own. But the Republican Party doesn’t necessarily speak for all conservatives and the tea party movement has its own voice and this is our chance to be heard.”
Republicans, including Tea Partiers, seem very conflicted about Marco Rubio. They sense that he is a rising star who might be able to win the White House one day, perhaps in 2016. They don’t want to harm him or disown him, but they really don’t support his effort to create a pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented Latinos living in this country. They should be celebrating that one of their own is delivering the official Republican message, but they still feel compelled to trash that message and offer a more militant one.
Rand Paul, on the other hand, is only vaguely more representative of the GOP than his father was. People say that he is likely to run for president in 2016, and he probably needs to do that if he wants keeps his father’s organization alive. But following in the footsteps of Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain is not a smart political move for anyone who actually wants to win.