- 10/22, Peggy Noonan: "Tea Party to the Rescue, How the GOP was saved from Bush and the establishment," WSJ.com
"The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration's spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this,
- the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: "We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!"
They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.
And they not only freed the Washington establishment, they woke it up. That establishment, composed largely of 50- to 75-year-olds who came to Washington during the Reagan era in a great rush of idealism, in many cases stayed on, as they say,
- not to do good but to do well.
They populated a conservative infrastructure that barely existed when Reagan was coming up: the think tanks and PR groups, the media outlets and governmental organizations.
- They did not do what conservatives are supposed to do, which is finish their patriotic work and go home,
taking the knowledge and sophistication derived from Washington and applying it to local problems. (This accounts in part for the esteem in which former Bush budget chief and current Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is held. He went home.)
- The GOP establishment stayed, and one way or another lived off government,
breathed in its ways and came to know—learned all too well!—the limits of what is possible and passable. Part of the social and cultural reality behind the tea party-GOP establishment split has been the sheer fact
- that tea partiers live in non-D.C. America.
- The establishment came from America, but hasn't lived there in a long time....
Finally, the tea party stiffened the GOP's spine by forcing it to recognize
- what it had not actually noticed, that we are a nation in crisis.
The tea party famously has no party chiefs and no conventions but it does have a theme—stop the spending, stop
- the sloth, incompetence and unneeded regulation—
and has lent it to the GOP."...
- (Ms. Noonan is catching on). ed.
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