For all its ignorance and anger, the Tea Party is on a roll

AMERICA: Democrats have been seized with a sense of dread that the Palin clone might actually win

A 41-YEAR-OLD Sarah Palin clone with a chequered past and a tendency to make crazy statements overturned the common wisdom about the mid-term elections when she seized the Republican nomination for Joe Biden’s former Senate seat on Tuesday night.

Democrats – including the White House – were initially euphoric at Christine O’Donnell’s victory. Polls had shown that her Republican rival, 71-year-old Mike Castle, a nine-term Congressman and former governor of Delaware, was certain to beat the Democrat candidate Chris Coons. O’Donnell burst out from nowhere, with the endorsement of Palin and $216,000 from the California-based Tea Party Express, to defeat Castle.

Suddenly, the Democrats looked well placed to keep the Delaware seat – and the Senate. They fear losing both houses of Congress on November 2nd, and a single Senate seat could make the difference.

But by yesterday, liberal pundits displayed something like a sense of dread, based on the realisation that O’Donnell might actually win. After all, the Democrats lost Ted Kennedy’s former seat in Massachusetts last January, when the Democrat who was tipped to win was blindsided by Republican Scott Brown, with Tea Party support.

Across the country, from Florida to Alaska, the Tea Party wrested nominations from establishment Republicans in primaries. The Democrats thought they’d be easy to beat, but now that assumption is shattered.

Shattered too, the rearguard attempt by the Republican establishment to fend off the Tea Party takeover of the right. “Every person they tell us to support is a dud,” said the ultra conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh after O’Donnell’s victory. “This is about conservatives taking back the Republican Party.” Karl Rove, who was George W Bush’s chief strategist, was chagrined at O’Donnell’s victory. “It does conservatives little good to support candidates who, while they may be conservative in their public statements, do not evince the characteristics of rectitude, truthfulness and sincerity and character the voters are looking for,” he told Fox News on Tuesday night.

But the Tea Party fought back, in the form of chief "Mama Grizzly", Sarah Palin. "Bless his heart," Palin said of Rove. "We love our friends there in the machine . . . I say, 'Buck up'." Palin also offered media advice to her protégée O'Donnell, saying, "Talk to Fox." As the Washington Postcolumnist Eugene Robinson observed, O'Donnell "has mastered the Sarah Palin Effect . . the perkiness, the folksiness, the religiosity, the occasional flash of bared fangs." Rove quickly back-pedalled, claiming he'd endorsed O'Donnell. Tom Ross, the Republican Party chairman in Delaware who had said during the campaign that O'Donnell "could not be elected dog-catcher", decided it was "time to come together".

O’Donnell claims to have raised more than $1 million in campaign donations since her surprise victory. Republicans are falling over themselves to support her, including the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a Republican presidential hopeful, who immediately offered her $5,000 from his war chest.

O’Donnell makes earlier Tea Party nominees like Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada look almost mainstream. Paul has said he has reservations about the 1964 Civil Rights Act which banned discrimination on the basis of race. Angle wants to dismantle the Departments of Education and Energy and privatise Social Security – a step she would model on the 1980s military dictatorship in Chile. Paul looks likely to win, and Angle is gaining on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

O’Donnell calls herself a marketing consultant, but she earned less than $6,000 last year, defaulted on her mortgage and owes back taxes. She lied about her college degree and about her performance in past races against Joe Biden. In the 1990s, she founded a group called “Saviour’s Alliance” which was obsessed with sexual abstinence, including from masturbation.

In the wake of her victory, someone found a 2007 interview in which O'Donnell railed against stem cell research. "They are – they are doing that here in the US," she said. "American scientific companies are cross-breeding humans and animals and coming up with mice with fully functioning human brains. So they're already into this experiment." Please, begged a New York Timeseditorial: "Defeating this new crop of Tea Party nominees has become imperative to avoid the sense of national embarrassment from each divisive and offensive utterance, each wacky policy proposal." For all its ignorance and anger, the Tea Party is on a roll. Historians see it as the successor to Barry Goldwater's conservative uprising in 1964, and Ronald Reagan's 1980 revolution. Over the decades, the Republican Party has steadily moved right, shedding moderates from the north and east, picking up religious and social conservatives from the south and west – the new, Tea-powered party is a less rational, more ideological creature than its forbears