ShareThisWASHINGTON - The "Tea Party tidal wave" that Rand Paul predicted was headed for Kentucky has indeed left the Bluegrass State submerged in a bitter infusion.
Paul's landslide victory in the state's Republican Senate primary marks the Tea Party movement's biggest coup yet, as angry GOP voters put the party establishment on notice that moderation is not an option when it comes to combating President Barack Obama's agenda.
After Tea Partiers knocked off the sitting GOP Senator in Utah and chased Florida's governor from that state's Republican Senate primary, the Kentucky race confirms the ascendancy of the anti-government forces within the party.
Paul, a 47-year-old eye surgeon who espouses a minimalist state and outlawing abortion, beat establishment candidate Trey Grayson by a margin of almost 25 percentage points in Tuesday's primary. He will now carry the GOP banner in this fall's mid-term congressional elections.
"I have a message, a message from the Tea Party, a message that does not mince words: We've come to take our government back," Paul told supporters, including his father, Texas GOP Rep. Ron Paul. "The Tea Party movement is about saving the country from a mountain of debt that is devouring our country and, I think, could lead to chaos."
University of Kentucky political science professor Stephen Voss took issue with Paul's characterization of his win as the product of Tea Party mobilization, suggesting the movement gained more from its association with its chosen candidate than Paul did from the group's backing.
"The Tea Party latched on to Paul, rather than the other way around," Voss said in an interview. "But he understands that if his victory is seen as a Tea Party victory then it has more potential to spread than if it's just seen as the quirky success of a candidate with name recognition."
Either way, Rand Paul's victory will embolden and empower Tea Partiers as they seek to crown winners in dozens of races unfolding across the country to choose GOP candidates for November's vote, when contests for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives and 36 in the Senate will be held.
It also presents the Republican Party with an existential dilemma. What the party stands for is being redefined on Tea Partiers' terms. But the GOP risks finding itself increasingly estranged from mainstream electors, especially if an economic recovery defuses dissatisfaction with the Obama administration and Democratic-controlled Congress.
Unfortunately for Obama, that narrative has yet to materialize.
Polls show that independent voters who abandoned the Republicans in droves during the final years of George W. Bush's tenure now want the party to retake control of Congress in November. Fully 38 percent of independent voters would prefer a GOP-led Congress, compared to 30 percent who chose the Democrats, according to last week's Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey.
Even suburban women, who backed the Democrats over Republicans by a 24-percentage point margin in the 2006 mid-term elections, now prefer the Republicans, the poll showed.
Those favoring GOP control of Congress are also more likely to vote this fall, with 56 percent of Republican supporters saying they are "most interested" in the mid-term elections, compared to 36 percent of Democratic backers. Less than 40 percent of the electorate typically votes in mid-term elections.
It is opposition to Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and their policies that is driving voters back to the Republicans, however, rather than any renewed enthusiasm for the GOP.
Ironically, even with significant Democratic losses, Pelosi could emerge more powerful after the midterms than she is now and more emboldened to pursue a progressive agenda.
It is still far from certain the GOP could make the net gain of 40 seats it needs to retake control of the House. Decades of gerrymandering and the fact that Americans increasingly choose to live among those just like them -- a phenomenon dubbed "the big sort" by author Bill Bishop -- mean there are typically fewer seats in play at each election.
The most vulnerable House Democrats remain those who represent conservative-leaning swing districts. If they go down, but the party retains an overall majority in the House, Pelosi would reign over a more cohesive, liberal-minded caucus.
With the mid-term election still more than five months off, only the most foolhardy prognosticator could dismiss such a scenario. Knock a couple of percentage points off the unemployment rate -- the U.S. economy produced almost 600,000 jobs in the first four months of 2010 -- and the political landscape could look very different by November.
The coming months will determine who has staying power. When the broader American electorate starts to tune in, will it opt to see Obama as the "secular socialist machine" decried by Newt Gingrich or as the determined centrist trying to forge fair compromises despite the extraordinarily raw economic hand he has been dealt?
"What if Barack Obama is not a tone-deaf big spender who misread the public on large-scale government reform such as health care, but is, instead what he has always been: a smart, steady and unobtrusively savvy politician whose long-term bets (his first being winning the presidency itself) are well-considered?" Newsweek editor Jon Meacham asks in the magazine's current issue.
Obama hints at the answer himself, telling Jonathan Alter in "The Promise," a newly released account of the president's first year in office: "That whole philosophy of persistence is one that I'm going to be emphasizing again and again as long as I'm in office. I'm a big believer in persistence."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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