Political Elite Still Utterly Baffled…

…by this new-found taste for Tea amongst the citizenry:

The swell of support for the Tea Party movement continues to grow in the United States according to a new poll released yesterday even as some of its standard-bearers show themselves adept at attracting attention that in normal times would spell political poison more than gold.

‘We just don’t understand it?! How can they vote for them, how..?!?’

A Wall Street Journal-NBC survey suggests that 71 per cent of Republican voters now support the Tea Party or say that they hope candidates running with express backing from it do well in congressional elections set for 2 November.

Ooooh, it’s going to be a bloodbath. I hope.

Without question, the movement is generating all important grass-roots enthusiasm just five weeks away from the congressional elections.

However, the conservative nature of the movement is shifting the party as a whole to the right.

The rightwingers are coming! The rightwingers are coming!

And when voting day comes, it is distinctly possible that independents who might have defected from Democrats to Republicans could have second thoughts.

If the fact that the Repubs are shifting rightwards is what puts them off, then maybe they were in the wrong party anyway?

It may also turn out that the craziness of a few Tea Party-backed candidates could do for the Democrats what Barack Obama and other leaders of the party have so far failed to do: impart on them a sense of urgency to get out and vote on 2 November also.

Now we can see just how toxic the Obama brand has become, and in such a short period of time.

They can’t point to their Obamassiah’s track record of successes. They can’t even rely on his popularity with the hard-core of the party. The best that they can hope for is that they can point to the Tea Party candidates and say ‘Look! Even Obama is better than that! Scary small-state people! Ooooga-boooga!’

A touch of otherness is, of course, precisely the quality that some Tea Party followers want in their candidates. That was roughly the response, for example, of Mr Paladino's campaign manager, Michael Caputo, when tackled about the past legal histories of some of his boss's inner-circle. "This is a campaign of junkyard dogs, not pedigreed poodles," he said.

To which I can only say…

‘Woof!’