Jim DeMint: Leading the Right's Rebel Brigade

Senator Jim DeMint has harnessed Tea Party populism but infuriated GOP elders. Is he taking the Republican Party toward salvation — or destruction?

By Jay Newton-Small and Michael Crowley Thursday, Nov. 18, 2010
    • Nigel Parry for TIME

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    That brings us to the real question regarding DeMint and the Tea Party movement he has come to represent. Are they leading the Republican Party down the road to salvation — or to self-destruction?

    Purity Can Be Painful
    "I am way out of my comfort zone," DeMint told TIME, sitting in a Senate office conference room a few hours before his Republican colleagues formally voted to accept his no-earmark rule. Earlier that day he had been mobbed by reporters inside the Capitol, something that makes him squirm a bit. "It's not my personality at all."

    It's true that DeMint has never been one for flash and bombast. James Warren DeMint was born in 1951 in Greenville, S.C. His parents divorced when he was 5, and DeMint's mother managed the family "like a drill sergeant." For income, she ran a ballroom-dancing school — the DeMint Academy of Dance and Decorum — from the house. As a boy, DeMint absorbed traditional values from television shows like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. (He calls Andy Griffith "my surrogate father" and even slightly resembles the actor, with the same wholesome mild manner to boot.) Not that he was always a model citizen in his youth. "I set my moral standards low ... I had a fast car and a slow brain," he has written. But that changed after he had a Christian awakening when he was in his mid-20s. He earned a graduate degree in business at Clemson and pursued a career in market research.

    It wasn't until he was in his late 40s that DeMint jumped into politics, after helping out in a friend's run for Congress. DeMint was incensed by what he considered a growing public reliance on government largesse for things like housing, food and income, which to him was creating dependency and stifling free enterprise. DeMint set out to shrink government and expand "freedom" — the central word in his political lexicon. In 1998 he was elected to the House of Representatives from the Greenville area, and six years later to the Senate.

    After Republicans lost their congressional majorities in 2006, DeMint found himself disgusted with his party and the "clowns," as he calls them, who had voted for earmark-stuffed budget bills and spending expansions, like an expensive new Medicare prescription-drug subsidy that passed in 2003. Those Bush-era Republicans "betrayed the trust of the American people" and deserved to lose, he says. So the Senator implored his colleagues to change their ways, and when they didn't seem to be listening — "people were more concerned with their parochial interests" than the good of the party or the nation — he resolved to change his colleagues. His goal was to root out Republicans who complained about spending but then guzzled from the public trough.

    DeMint's first move, in April 2009, was to tell Republican Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania that he would be endorsing Specter's conservative primary rival, Pat Toomey. Although Specter had often voted with Democrats, the national GOP backed him in the primary anyway. That, after all, is the custom with party incumbents. (Specter switched parties and became a Democrat the same day.) But to DeMint, such cozy customs are precisely what ails his party. So two months later he struck again, with his endorsement of Rubio — then a little-known state legislator — who went on to trounce sitting Florida governor Charlie Crist by 19 points. He was also an early supporter of Paul, who took on a local favorite of McConnell's in Kentucky. In all, a political-action committee that DeMint formed for his candidates raised and spent nearly $7.5 million during the midterm campaign. DeMint boasts that $5.5 million of that cash was raised via his website in contributions averaging less than $50 (although some of it also came from less populist sources, including several corporations; $10,000 came from Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire conservative activists and oil moguls Charles and David Koch).

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