The Pitchfork Primaries: Will Washington Get the Message?

The Kelly green golf course, the limpid lap pool, the khaki slacks and crisp sundresses all seemed to murmur Establishment, but unhappiness is so widespread this year that revolutions are stirring in the strangest places. At a country club in Bowling Green, Ky., a handsome ophthalmologist named Rand Paul lobbed another missile Tuesday night toward the battered fortress of Washington’s elite. “I have a message, a message from the Tea Party,” Paul announced after crushing the old guard’s favored candidate for his state’s Republican Senate nomination. “A message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We have come to take our government back.”

Before the votes were counted May 18 in Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Arkansas, a few jaded members of the capital’s insider clique — the Permanent Party — still sniffed that they’d heard all this before. In 1994, in 1980, in 1966. Someone’s always coming to take the government back. Ho-hum.

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But no one was yawning the morning after, as the insistent notes of rebellion throbbed on the hollow drum of official power. The natives are restless. Americans of all persuasions at last agree on something. It is a message to their leaders that starts with F and ends with u. In Kentucky, the cream of the GOP — Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, former Vice President Dick Cheney, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — all backed a fellow named Trey Grayson against newcomer Paul. They got the message loud and clear. In the other party, Barack Obama’s stamp of approval meant diddly to the Democrats of Pennsylvania and Arkansas, where outsider candidates ended the 30-year Senate career of Arlen Specter and pushed Blanche Lincoln, chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, limping into a runoff.

Credit Obama with a well-tuned nose for trouble. He spent Election Day far from the Oval Office and far from Specter and Lincoln too, touring an 85-ton electric arc furnace in Youngstown, Ohio, in search of an alibi. “It’s just nice to get out of Washington,” he said understatedly.

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There was a lonely bleat of cluelessness from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). This electioneering arm of the House leadership congratulated itself on a triumph in the special election to replace the late master of pork, Representative John Murtha of Pennsylvania. Marie Antoinette had nothing on it. Could the DCCC really have missed the fact that Mark Critz held onto the seat by opposing health care reform, denouncing cap and trade, embracing the gun culture and standing against abortion? If Speaker Nancy Pelosi drank Coke, Critz would have campaigned in a Pepsi truck. Earth to House leadership: That’s not a vote of confidence.

The wave of anti-incumbent, anti-Washington energy is more than just a reaction to 9.9% unemployment and one-party rule and more than the customary cycle of off-year voting behaviors. It has been brewing through a decade or more of rising uncertainty and declining confidence. In 2002, during another off-year election in the shadow of a recession, the Harris Poll found that a mere 22% of Americans had great faith in Congress and only 19% strongly trusted Wall Street. This year the number is 8% for both. Same vibe, greater intensity — and further multiplied by the do-it-yourself culture of online organizing.

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Specter’s Last Hurrah
In such a climate, what does it mean to be an official, an authority? Sez who? On Specter’s behalf, Governor Ed Rendell pulled out all the stops on the mammoth pipe organ of Pennsylvania politics — the union locals and Philly civil servants and AME pastors who normally drive the Democratic vote — but when he pressed the familiar keys, no one was listening. Upstart Democrat Joe Sestak, though hardly a natural campaigner, won strolling away. Bill Clinton failed to sway his fellow Arkansans for Lincoln; the Blanche-bashing bloggers of the left probably had a greater influence on the outcome by urging Lieutenant Governor Bill Halter to jump into the race. In Kentucky, a onetime Republican county chairman named Jack Richardson went rogue for Paul, then said at his victory party, “People don’t understand the depth of the revolt that’s taking place. A lot of people in the Beltway have been in a state of denial. This is going to wake them up a little bit.”

But wake them up to what? Scorning authority and punishing the insiders only works when you’re on the outside; it serves poorly as a governing strategy or a re-election theme. No one should know this better than Obama, who in 2008 surfed this selfsame wave to victory in the ultimate outsider’s campaign. He declared a new era in American politics, but it turns out the old era was just getting revved up.

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How does the ultimate authority figure, Mr. Finger on the Button, avoid being washed out by the same wave that swept him into power? Obama’s future rests on his ditching the peacemaker rap and casting himself as a scourge. Already the White House is hard at work hammering its ploughshares into swords. Spokesman Robert Gibbs recently vowed to keep a “boot on the throat” of BP, an apt indication that the Administration is tuned to the mood of the moment. Obama has been battering health-insurance companies, big banks, radio talk jocks and recalcitrant Republicans. There will be more of that as long as the public remains angry — a little like the old joke about flogging the crew until morale improves.

He won’t be the first President to play outsider from a floodlit spot at center stage. When Ronald Reagan geared up for a re-election campaign during a crushing recession, he cast himself as the lonely voice against the return of free-spending liberalism. His theme was “stay the course,” but the course was hardly status quo. More than a decade later, after the 1994 elections brought Republicans to power in Congress for the first time in 40 years, Democrat Clinton positioned himself as a counterweight to both the right and the left — a sort of man without a party. He won a second term easily.

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What Reagan and Clinton both had going for them was an improving economy, and Americans remain unconvinced that Obama will see one of those anytime soon. Pollster Peter Hart observes that the public mood is increasingly “set in concrete.” Despite a growing GDP, three out of four voters say the country is still in a recession, and only 2% — yes, 2% — think the recession will be over by November. More than half the country believes we’re on the wrong track as a nation, an assessment that has darkened over the past seven months. Recent Pew Research Center polling found congressional approval at its lowest level in at least a quarter century.

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If anyone in Washington has made hay amid this gloom, it is Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, a backbencher with big ambitions and a small-government agenda. For years, DeMint has been the Cassandra of the fiscal right, warning his colleagues that they were abandoning their conservative base in pursuit of costly programs like No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit. He has seized on the Tea Party movement to advance his cause, boldly defying his party’s leadership to support successful insurgent candidates in Florida, Utah and now Kentucky. “I think for most Republicans in the Senate, the Tea Party is viewed as a threat,” DeMint told TIME, laughing. “To me it’s the cavalry I’ve been waiting for.”

A Revolt with Limits
Some Republicans believe that DeMint is fighting an ideological war at the expense of practical politics, sapping resources from the party and nominating extreme candidates even in moderate states. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, leader of the Republican effort to elect more Senators, said in a recent newspaper interview, “As a pragmatic matter, we’ve got to nominate Republicans who can get elected.” In fact, even though you could hardly exaggerate the excitement in Tea Party circles about Paul’s victory Tuesday, more cold-blooded Republicans whisper that his chances of winning in November are no better than even.

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It’s this view that argues for a paradoxical outcome in November. Suppose that the outsider victories of spring and summer can’t be converted into results in the general election. It stands to reason that Democrats, with their huge majorities, should suffer the brunt of an anti-incumbent storm, but the opposition is lagging in fundraising and divided at the top. “Republicans aren’t doing anything to increase the velocity of that storm,” says one party elder. The GOP needs a lot of victories to take control of Congress: 41 House seats and nine seats in the Senate. The complexity and volatility of the public’s anger — covering a waterfront from far left to far right — makes it impossible to predict such a one-sided outcome.

As Reagan liked to say, however: “There you go again.” Seat counting is the sport of Beltway insiders, the pastime of a Permanent Party worried more about preserving its power than doing anything useful with it — and therefore just another symptom of 2010, the year of the hacked-off American. If all politics used to be local, now all politics is personal. The libertarian Paul has no greater allegiance to GOP strategy than does his maverick dad, Texas Representative Ron Paul. They’re both on a family mission to throttle the government. Among Democrats, there isn’t even a consistent lineup of interest groups behind the incumbent killers. Big labor, for instance, lined up with Specter and against Lincoln. The likelihood that this angry wave will produce any governing coherence is virtually nil.

What it will do — what it is already achieving in abundance — is communicate the headaches and heartaches of the American people to the grandees within the gates of Washington.

— Reported by Alex Altman / Bowling Green, Jay Newton-Small / Philadelphia and Michael Scherer and Michael Duffy / Washington

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