TEABAGGING: WORKING LIKE A CHARM -- FOR THE GOP?

Politico's Alex Isenstadt notes that the tea party movement isn't achieving its electoral goals:

From Texas to Illinois to upstate New York, a string of lackluster showings for tea party-linked candidates have highlighted a central question about the group's future: Can an organic and fledgling movement that lacks the institutional grounding and top-down organizational strength of either major political party transfer protest-oriented grass-roots energy into tangible success at the polls?

In Tuesday's Texas GOP primary, ... [g]ubernatorial candidate Debra Medina, who closely aligned herself with the grass-roots conservative movement, picked up just 19 percent of the vote....

In last month's Illinois primary, tea party favorite Patrick Hughes won just 19 percent against GOP Rep. Mark Kirk in the Senate primary....

Well, yeah -- but Medina lost after the winner of that race, Rick Perry, became even more tea party-friendly than he'd been -- invoking secession and the 10th Amendment and all that -- while Kirk took

a rightward turn in the primary campaign: vowing to reverse an earlier vote in favor of controversial cap-and-trade carbon emission regulation; using heated rhetoric to oppose housing Guantanamo Bay terror suspects at a little-used prison in northwestern Illinois; and even trying to encourage former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to say good things about him.

I was thinking about this as I read Carl Cannon's latest article at Politics Daily, "Six Reasons Barack Obama is Still the Odds-on Favorite in 2012." There's something to Cannon's list of reasons (a few of them: Obama is still the candidate of younger voters; Obama could bounce back from big losses for his party in the midterms just as Reagan and Clinton did) -- but there's also this:

In a recent Gallup Poll, Obama was losing by 14 points among these swing voters in a 2012 matchup to something called the "generic Republican."

[But] in a "binary" general election campaign, voters won't be choosing between Obama and any idealized view of a "generic" Republican.... by the time the Republicans have chosen their standard-bearer, that candidate will almost certainly have staked out policy positions well to the right of the country as a whole. The upshot is that generic Republican numbers in 2010 are higher among independent or moderate voters than a real Republican's would likely be after surviving the cauldron of the primary season.

But see what's happening in primaries? Tea party candidates are running. Non-tea-party candidates are tacking to the right (or, in Perry's case, further to extreme right) to meet them partway. Then the tea party candidate loses ... and the winner looks reasonable. The winner looks like the good cop. The winner has absorbed the tea party's ideology to a greater or lesser extent, yet is appealing to swing voters. General election success is in sight.

Maybe it won't work that way -- this year or in 2012. But don't rule it out.

And why assume that the tea party energy won't still be there when the establishment Republican wins the primary? As Politico's Isenstadt notes:

And even if it isn't winning races, the tea party movement is impacting the broader electoral landscape as it brings vocal and active grass-roots energy to the conservative cause.

"They are the energy force for Republicans right now," said Tom Davis, a former Virginia congressman and chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. "They are the people that will help drive turnout, and they have a message that will resonate with voters who have been disenfranchised over the last few cycles."

Maybe that's overly optimistic. But the tea party movement is much more an anti-Obama, anti-Democrat force than it is a purist movement about ideas, no matter what the conventional wisdom says.

We'll know in November, and two Novembers after that. But I'm sticking with my theory that Republicans are using the tea party movement as a Judas goat to lead voters their way.