Weak tea

By Mustang Bobby

The election results in Virginia, New York, New Jersey, and Alabama indicate that the Tea Party had a bad day.

Terry McAuliffe, no one’s idea of a perfect candidate, beat Ken Cuccinelli for governor of Virginia. Mr. Cuccinelli was the personification of Tea Party ideology with the added touch of evangelical prudery, homophobia, and misogyny. That the election was close was probably more an indication of Mr. McAuliffe’s utter lack of charm than a late surge of voters in favor of transvaginal probing and banning sodomy. There’s only so much purity that the voters can take.

In New Jersey, the re-election of Chris Christie sets the stage for the 2016 primary starting today. Even though rational people know that Mr. Christie is not a moderate centrist Republican by any standard, he’s viewed with deep suspicion by the Tea Party because he once shook hands with Barack Obama and said nice things about him. That makes him a heretic in the eyes of the Inquisitors, and will doom any chances he has of winning in primaries in places like Texas or the Deep South.

Speaking of the Deep South, a run-off election in Alabama put an establishment Republican in the House over an avowed Tea Partier and birther. It’s hard to imagine that a bomb-thrower like that could lose in Alabama, but even there they seem to have their limit on the nutsery.

A lot of obituaries have been written about the Tea Party only to have the zombies rise from the grave once again, but it’s pretty hard to see yesterday’s election results as a sign of vigorous health for it. But rest assured that somewhere in the aftermath of these elections, there is some Republican strategist who is certain that they lost because their candidates weren’t conservative enough.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)