GOP Considers Palin and Tea Party a Necessary Evil

While conservative pundits continue to say that Republicans are none too pleased about some of the crazy Tea Party candidates who have gotten themselves nominated for Republican House and Senate seats this year, they still have to admit that without them, the party doesn’t stand a chance in hell of taking back control of Congress.

The proof is in the way we are seeing staunch old school Republicans such as Karl Rove practically getting down on all fours and licking Sarah Palin’s Manolo Blahniks for handing them a Republican Congress in November. Rove can only imagine the Tea Party as a third party, instead of the red-headed stepchild of the GOP, and he shivers.

Talk about the Tea Party becoming a third political party is tempting only for the Tea Partiers themselves, not for the Republicans. Trying to keep Palin happy so she won’t take her influence and let that very thing happen is taking its toll on staunch Republicans like Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Karl Rove and others. You can see it in their body language when forced to share a stage with Palin, smiling through clenched teeth, nostrils flaring, fake cordials.

If you believe that Sarah Palin, herself is capable of getting the Republican Party to lick her boots, you overestimate her power. She is being driven by someone else’s money and quest for power. Someone who knows that the Tea Partiers need the Conservatives just as much as the Conservatives need the Tea Partiers. A break into two parties would mean a split in votes and the real possibility of the Democrats coming out on top.

To understand this a little better, one has only to look at what happened in the 2000 Presidential elections. It was George W. Bush taking on Vice President Al Gore and, say what you will, Gore was expected to win the election on the popular vote. In fact, Gore actually was elected President according to the popular vote. Some say that Ralph Nader, who ran on the Green Party ticket, took valuable votes away from Al Gore and cost him the election. While Nader vehemently denies this, the fact of the matter is many believe that is exactly what happened. And that is what could happen if the Tea Party were to splinter off into a third party.

Fast forward to 2010 mid-term elections. There are two parties—the Democrats and the Republicans. There is no third party, at least none that has candidates running in the election that could pull votes away from the Republican or Democrat parties. While the Tea Party movement members do have a tendency to lean toward conservative beliefs, they are not happy with the conservative agenda. They hate the thought of big business influencing Washington politics almost as much as they hate government running their lives. They don’t want to pay taxes but at the same time, they don’t want corporations to get a tax break while they suffer.

The Tea Party movements has its own agenda and it does not line up well with that of the Republicans. If they were a third party in the election coming up and their candidates were running against Republicans, it is a distinct possibility that Democrats would win the elections because Tea Party members would vote for their own candidates and there wouldn’t be enough votes to carry and election. By voting for their candidates, they’d pull votes away from the Republican candidates, making it difficult for them to get a majority vote as well. And certainly, Republicans would not be voting for the whackos running on the Tea Party ticket.

Makes one wonder if the Tea Partiers plan on ever really breaking away from the Conservatives and forming their own party. If they were running the show, it might have already happened. But the moment they teamed up with Sarah Palin and the money behind Sarah Palin, the game plan changed and the poor folks who signed on to the Tea Party Express were gobbled up by the very people whom they are fighting so hard against—big business.

For now, the Republicans consider the Tea Party a necessary evil and are going along with their far right agenda to ensure success in November. But after the elections, it may be the Tea Party that begins to shed their Republican skins kind of like the lizard people on the hit mini-series “V” years ago and if that happens, it’s anyone’s guess what kind of election year 2012 will be. One thing is for sure, any Democrat worth their salt will be cheering the Tea Party on.