What could go wrong?

They have some things in common — the need to rebound from recent woes and to carve out identities against fierce competition — but CNN and the Tea Party Express would seem like unlikely candidates for a partnership. …

For CNN, the joint sponsorship seems to undermine the nonpartisan positioning it’s made its brand, linking it with a controversial conservative political action committee whose former chairman resigned after a series of race-baiting comments (including calling the proposed Lower Manhattan mosque a monument to worship “the terrorists’ monkey god”).

For the Tea Party Express, the debate could damage its credibility with the tea party movement, whose followers have been leery of the mainstream media and of the Tea Party Express itself, which rival tea partiers blast as a GOP-linked slush fund.

But it places both organizations among a select number of political and media players sponsoring debates in the derby to determine the GOP nominee to take on President Barack Obama in 2012 — including the Iowa and South Carolina Republican parties, the New Hampshire Union Leader, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, POLITICO, NBC News, Fox News and ABC News.

TPE ran into some squabbles with other Tea Party organizations, and also had some bad publicity under previous leadership.  However, it remains one of several larger Tea Party organizations, which is why CNN is drawn to it.  However, CNN also has a spotty record when it comes to covering the Tea Party, including one notorious incident when former CNN reporter Susan Roesgen started arguing with people in the crowd about politics and then reported that it was getting rough in the Chicago protest.  CNN later declined to renew Roesgen’s contract.

Grassroots Tea Party activists hate the deal, both for its elevation of TPE as the main Tea Party organization as well as CNN’s involvement in the process.  They’re not alone in the latter, as MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann argues in an e-mail to Politico:

MSNBC’s liberal anchor Keith Olbermann contended the move puts the lie to CNN’s effort to position itself as a more objective alternative to Fox and MSNBC and exposes an ongoing rightward drift.

“The alliance isn’t the problem. It’s the continuing pretense that CNN is neutral,” he wrote in an e-mail to POLITICO. “They’ve been hemorrhaging viewers not because they’re nonpartisan but because the viewers recognize they are arrogantly and condescendingly pretending to be.”

Well, if anyone knows arrogant and condescending, it’s Olbermann.  However, this argument doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.  Television networks routinely partner with partisan organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus to air presidential primary debates.  Labor unions get in the act as well, as do (presumably) conservative-leaning business groups.   Why not partner with the Tea Party?  Or should such partnerships only arise when the partner is part of the political establishment ?

The question of partnering with CNN is similar.  It would be better for the Tea Party to partner with all of the television networks, in whatever form that might take, in order to ensure that conservative causes get as much play as possible in primary GOP debates.  In fact, the Tea Party should partner with one of the networks for a Democratic Party debate, although there probably won’t be many of those in this cycle, unless Barack Obama chooses not to run for a second term.

At least in this case, the debate will take place in the last four months of the year, rather than in the spring.  By Labor Day, we can expect to know everyone who will actually run for the job, and hopefully will whittle down the number of people on the stage to a manageable level.  The timing is good, even if the partnership is arguable.

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