THE TEA PARTY AND ITS DEMONS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL OP EDITORIAL ( HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

WONDER LAND

SEPTEMBER 23, 2010.

The Tea Party and Its Demons

O'Donnell, Paladino and Angle should stay on message: Stop-the-Spending.

By DANIEL HENNINGER

It has become clear that this is not just another remarkable off-year election in which the parties flip political control. It isn't 1994, when the Gingrich insurgency won back the House from the Democrats. It is bigger than that.

As the tea party gained attention and its candidates won primary elections, the political establishment began to understand that the movement—whose supporters obviously extend past the borders of the official tea party groups—wasn't just about picking off this or that incumbent. The movement is massing to hand the establishment a decisive defeat. Six months ago, this would have been laughable. No longer.

The Republicans will survive November. The Republicans have been accessories to what the movement is trying to stop, but for the modern Democratic Party, this is the kingdom they created. The tea party is a threat to their empire, and the shrewdest among them know it. Which means that unlike GOP incumbents, the Democratic empire isn't going to roll over for the tea party. It is going to launch a counteroffensive, and it won't be pretty.

Two weeks ago in Philadelphia, a few days before Christine O'Donnell drove Mike Castle out of politics in plain-vanilla Delaware, one of the Democrats' smartest political minds, Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, explained how his party would fight back : "It's a party [the Republicans] that's slowly but surely being taken over by wackos. They're nuts. They're flat-out crazy. . . . We're going to turn the reins of Congress over to these people who are more and more dominated by the wacko wing?"

Ed Rendell knows that the Delawareans who voted for Ms. O'Donnell are not nuts. What he also knows is that in American politics it is possible to enlist the conservative-phobic elements of the media to define and marginalize an opposition like this as "outside the mainstream."

On Sunday, a New York Times piece summarized how Democrats are planning "to vanquish the Tea Party." Their plan includes "repeatedly pointing out positions they believe general election voters would not cotton to, like privatizing Social Security, abolishing entire federal departments, upending certain civil rights laws and outlawing abortion, even in the case of rape." A Democratic pollster was explicit: "You paint the picture by unfolding the extremist vision."

This can work in close elections, unless the targets clarify for voters who they are and what they stand for.

In Delaware, the Democrats' Chris Coons is expected to defeat Christine O'Donnell. Other than charisma and celebrity, what does Ms. O'Donnell stand for? In Nevada, Harry Reid is in a statistical dead heat with tea party candidate Sharron Angle, who seems to think she is going to beat the Senate majority leader with the immigration issue. In New York, Carl Paladino, a nobody, crushed Rick Lazio in the GOP gubernatorial primary, and yesterday a Quinnipiac poll put him an astounding six points behind Democratic titan Andrew Cuomo. This cannot possibly be because New Yorkers think the mercurial Mr. Paladino would make a terrific governor. He, Christine O'Donnell and others are not winning because they look like leaders but because they are None of the Above. Not Castle, not Cuomo, not Them.

They are winning because they stand for one thing—the tea party. What prescient Democrats like Mr. Rendell now see is that the tea party isn't "crazy," as originally thought. And it isn't even a party but something more potent. It's a new political belief system.

The political status quo, whatever good it did at times over the past 50 years, has arrived at a dead zone. The status quo—a vast, aging network of appropriators, Beltway enablers, bloodless public unions and private-sector pilot fish—budgeted the federal government, California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois and other states to the brink of effective bankruptcy.

The Obama administration is the dismaying, logical end-point of decades of public spending, a Gargantua that now threatens to smother everything else in the American economy. Velma Hart's confronting Barack Obama at that town-hall meeting Monday about the stalled economy—"I'm waiting, sir, I'm waiting"—may have been the central moment in what is happening now. It was the parable of the Emperor's New Clothes: He isn't wearing anything at all!

The torpid political world, the ancien regime, has put the nation at long-term risk. It is killing America's ability to revive from this punishing recession and compete with fast-running nations like China, India, Brazil and South Korea.

What the tea party and independent voters sympathetic to it are about is giving the United States the tools to compete again in the big global game. It starts with Stop-the-Spending. To the Democrats now demonizing the tea party and its candidates, those three words mean Armageddon, the end of their game.

The tea partiers—the good, the bad and, alas, the ugly—have to repeat that one strong, garlicky point over and over in public. It trumps everything, even politicians campaigning on broomsticks.

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