But this election cycle has exposed Rove for what he is: man-servant to the oiligarchs. Rove’s most significant activity this year has been raising big, secret donations from the Republican rich and turning them into the ugly, inaccurate negative ads that have been his stock-in-trade forever. Rove’s bosses don’t represent the entire panoply of Republican money; they tend to be sunbelt sorts, involved in extraction industries. People like the Koch brothers. They are the very same people who gave the world George W. Bush–and would have given us John Connally, Phil Gramm and Steve Forbes, if any of them hadn’t been so profoundly unattractive as candidates.

If the Tea Party has brought anything refreshing to the table, it’s a sense of skepticism that occasionally reaches past Big Government to include Big Business.