Can the Tea Party Cross the Delaware?
In any other election cycle, at any other moment in Delaware's political history, Mike Castle would be coasting to victory. A two-time governor and longtime member of Congress, Castle, 71, has $2.6 million in the bank, a statewide approval rating in the high 60s and the backing of just about every official Republican institution in the country, including the Delaware state party, which in May endorsed him to run for Vice President Joe Biden's old Senate seat.
But in Castle's more than 40 years as a politician, he has never had to deal with someone quite like Amy Kremer, a former flight attendant from Atlanta who arrived in Delaware on Tuesday, only one week before the Sept. 14 Republican primary. Hours later, she gathered reporters and activists in a Wilmington hotel to officially christen Castle the latest target of the voter rebellion known as the Tea Party. "The time has come for us to put down the protest signs and pick up the campaign signs and get engaged," Kremer announced, adding that her group would spend at least $250,000 to oust the Delaware GOP's political patriarch in favor of Christine O'Donnell, a tenacious conservative pundit and Tea Party standard bearer. "We have stood on the sidelines for long enough," Kremer said.
Just months ago, the views of a self-styled Citizen Jane would have been little more than a curiosity. Hardly anyone noticed in January when her group, the Tea Party Express, ran television ads in Massachusetts to support the long-shot election of Republican Scott Brown to the Senate. Nor were the political cognoscenti particularly interested in April when the group endorsed Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle, a little-known Republican also-ran then polling at just 5% in that state's GOP primary. And the smart money scoffed at Kremer's subsequent push for Alaska's Joe Miller, a local attorney on a seemingly impossible quest to unseat Senator Lisa Murkowski.
But then Brown, Angle and Miller all stunned the handicappers by winning their races, proving that the Tea Party was more than just a ragtag group with funny hats and signs. The Express and other Tea Party groups have demonstrated that Republican voters given a choice between the Establishment and an upstart will usually choose the outsider in 2010. "I think everybody is shocked," says Kremer, whose cell-phone ringtone is Brooks and Dunn's "Only in America." "We do it because we believe."
Though the Tea Party's successes so far have played out in GOP primaries, Kremer and her troops have the potential to transform the U.S. Senate. In addition to Angle and Miller, who both have solid shots at victory in November, two other Tea Party favorites, Utah's Mike Lee and Kentucky's Rand Paul, are favored to win. That means the Senate could have as many as four new Tea Party champions next year. In a capital city where compromise has long been out of fashion, it may soon go missing altogether.
drive from www.time.com
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