Tea party antics could end up burning Republicans
By Amy Gardner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 28, 2010
The tea party's volatile influence on this election year appears to be doing more harm than good for Republicans' chances in some of the closest races in the nation, in which little-known candidates who upset the establishment with primary wins are now stumbling in the campaign's final days.
In Kentucky, a volunteer for tea-party-backed Senate candidate Rand Paul was videotaped stepping on the head of a liberal protester. In Delaware and Colorado, Senate hopefuls Christine O'Donnell and Ken Buck, respectively, are under fire for denying that the First Amendment's establishment clause dictates a separation of church and state. In Nevada, GOP Senate nominee Sharron Angle is drawing rebuke for running TV ads that portray Latino immigrants as criminals and gang members.
Perhaps the most dramatic tea party problems are in Alaska, where Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller is suffering another round of unfavorable headlines after it was revealed late Tuesday that he had admitted lying about his misconduct while working as a government lawyer in Fairbanks.
Miller was conducting his own poll in 2008 in an effort to oust a state GOP chairman, and he used his colleagues' computers to vote in the survey, then erased their computers' caches to try to hide what he had done.
(More here.)
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 28, 2010
The tea party's volatile influence on this election year appears to be doing more harm than good for Republicans' chances in some of the closest races in the nation, in which little-known candidates who upset the establishment with primary wins are now stumbling in the campaign's final days.
In Kentucky, a volunteer for tea-party-backed Senate candidate Rand Paul was videotaped stepping on the head of a liberal protester. In Delaware and Colorado, Senate hopefuls Christine O'Donnell and Ken Buck, respectively, are under fire for denying that the First Amendment's establishment clause dictates a separation of church and state. In Nevada, GOP Senate nominee Sharron Angle is drawing rebuke for running TV ads that portray Latino immigrants as criminals and gang members.
Perhaps the most dramatic tea party problems are in Alaska, where Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller is suffering another round of unfavorable headlines after it was revealed late Tuesday that he had admitted lying about his misconduct while working as a government lawyer in Fairbanks.
Miller was conducting his own poll in 2008 in an effort to oust a state GOP chairman, and he used his colleagues' computers to vote in the survey, then erased their computers' caches to try to hide what he had done.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
I think Obama's antics will be far more costly than any Tea Party antics. Obama is an embarrassing cult of personality built on rhetoric and packaging. The Tea Party has legitimacy and lasting and is not any particular persona which makes it impossible to predict how it will weigh in the election on Tuesday.
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