Tea Buggery and the US Midterm Elections

All you heard on the mainstream media on election night was crowing from the commentariat about the Tea Party as a new force to be reckoned with in American politics. There were more than a few not unimportant places where the Tea Party story seemed to have been written by Lewis Carroll.

PART 1. In Your Guts, You Know He’s Nuts
The MS-NBC show highlighted a number of reality-challenged concession speeches. Below is the concession speech of the angry, moronic TP-backed candidate for governator of New York State, who had just lost his election bid by 25-odd points. The Cato Institute notwithstanding, this one actually ranks right up there with the famous Ted Baxter concession speech.

PART 2. "I'm not a witch!"
This was one of the greatest moments in disastrous American political communication of all time. Lyndon Johnson was correct about the strategy of accusing an opponent of habitually having sexual relations with swine. "I don't care if it's true," he claimed. "I want to hear him deny it!" If you call someone a crook, it usually takes a special kind of person to protest and claim, “I am not a crook.” Below is Christine O'Donnell walking into that trap with a state-wide advertisement that went viral and then spawned one of the best Saturday Night Live sketches since the Palindrome.

PART 3. Hoist by a Write-In Candidate
Below is the Momma Grizzly's declaration of Tea Party victory, direct from Alaska. The part that doesn't quite compute is that her hand-picked Alaska Senate candidate seems to have been defeated by the old-guard incumbent as a write-in candidate. Wow! So little attention has been paid to this that it must happen all the time in America. Actually, it hardly ever happens. There have only been two other successful write-in candidates for the Senate in American history and both of them were fairly special cases. Losing a contest to a write-in candidate in your own backyard smacks of the same kind of political acumen that worked so well for John McCain in 2008.

UPDATE (20 November 2010): Refudiated IWow! That’s still flagged as a spelling error) does not mean repudiated. Frank Rich has a pretty good column in tomorrow’s NYT here on this question.