Has the tea party peaked? Republican lawmakers affiliated with the upstart anti-tax movement scored big in the nerve-wracking debt-ceiling debacle, but the victory left enough hard feelings to feed the movement's ultimate downfall.
To quote an old Chicago White Sox slogan from the 1980s, their achievement was a case of "winning ugly."
With the nation's credit rating in the balance, they seized the normally routine matter of raising the nation's debt ceiling and held it hostage, gangsta-style: Cut government spending our way, they reasoned, and nobody gets hurt.
In the end, after weeks of partisan fighting, President Barack Obama signed without joy or ceremony a budget bill that avoided a credit default.
It cuts $2 trillion in spending over the next decade, yet shaves barely a sliver off of the expected growth in the national debt during that period.
That's largely because the bill doesn't include tax increases, a tea party no-no.
Instead the savings come entirely from cuts in programs and benefits.
Are there any reasons why this could hurt the teas and their allies?
I can think of three: Disappointment, divisiveness and dangerous disregard.
-- Disappointment. Polls indicate growing numbers of the public think the teas have become part of the problem they came to Washington to cure.
Fully 82 percent of Americans disapprove of Congress' performance in the hard-fought debt limit debate, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.
People love to hate Congress, even when they like their own congressman. But this was Congress' highest disapproval rating, the pollsters said, since they began asking the question in 1977.
And public disapproval of the "tea party" doubled to 40 percent from 18 percent when that question was first asked in April 2010.
Four out of five respondents said they thought the debacle was more about gaining political ground than advancing the nation's interests.
On that score, Congress is lucky that pollsters found any approval at all outside of the lawmakers' immediate families.
Forty-seven percent blamed congressional Republicans for the standoff while only 29 percent blamed President Obama and congressional Democrats. Twenty percent blamed both sides.
President Obama, whose approvals slid to a new low of 40 percent in another recent poll, knows how it feels to disappoint the people who sent you to Washington. Now the tea party does, too.
-- Divisiveness. The tea party movement grew out of conservative frustration with a Washington they saw as taxing and spending too much under both parties.
Republican leadership, still shaken from 2006 election losses, welcomed the new energy that led to a comeback in the 2010 midterm elections.
But fissures still show in the uneasy alliance between the teas and the party establishment.
As House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio pushed to strike a deal to increase the nation's borrowing authority, some of the tea party faction argued whether the debt ceiling should be raised at all.
The founding fathers would have quaked.
These issues undoubtedly will be put to the voters in next year's presidential races, reviving divisions between the Grand Old Party's conservative purists and the pragmatists who want a candidate who appeals to independent swing voters.
Tea party freshmen faced a more conservative electorate in the 2010 midterms than the larger turnout that's expected in a presidential year.
Yet they continue to push farther right. Let the voters decide.
-- Dangerous disregard. Even fellow conservatives are beginning to speak out against the frightening radical ax with which tea party folks want to take a wide swing at government spending.
"Don't call them conservatives," fumed conservative Hal Gordon, who wrote speeches for the Ronald Reagan White House and for Colin Powell, in a blog post. "Call them Banana Republicans if you like -- or Republicans-Gone-Bananas."
His beef, that the tea party faction is rewriting the meaning of conservatism in ways unimagined by historical figures like Edmund Burke, the father of modern conservatism, to save short-term dollars.
"First and foremost," Gordon exclaimed, "conservatives pay their bills." Amen.
Grassroots movements are like bees, an old saying goes, they sting and then they die.
The tea party, like the original Boston Tea Party, fits what the founders called a movement of the moment.
Like others, the teas are likely to melt, at best, into one of the major parties.
In the meantime, they can stir up a lot of mischief, even to those who otherwise want to be their allies.
E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.
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