The tea party is turning off moderates

In other words, while moderates have held two and gained one, the Tea Party radicals may have lost one and thrown away another. But you have to look at a third state, Pennsylvania, to assess the true cost of Tea Party radicalism. The huge Democratic victory of 2008 none the less left Democrats one seat shy of the 60 votes needed to break the power of a Senate filibuster.

But when Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter voted in favour of Obama’s fiscal stimulus, a mutiny erupted on the Republican Right. Pat Toomey, an ex-Congressman who headed a pressure group sympathetic to the Tea Party, announced that he would challenge Specter in the next year’s Republican primary.

It is hard to recall a more spectacular political miscalculation than Toomey’s. As his challenge gathered force, Mr Specter jumped ship to the Democrats, giving Obama the magic 60 Senate votes needed for health care reform…

It’s difficult for a political party to think strategically after a political defeat as severe as 2008’s. But the Tea Party elevated the inability to think strategically into a fundamental conservative principle. Its militants denounce those Republicans who have resisted the movement as ideological traitors: “Republicans in name only” or even (charmingly) as “Vichy Republicans”. In fact, the unthinking rejectionism of the Tea Party has strengthened Obama’s political position. Now it threatens to deplete Republican strength in Congress, losing races that could have been won.