The tea-party movement Waiting for Captain Am

Slate's roving political reporter, looks at the Iowa caucus entrance polls and draws three lessons from Tuesday night's results. I agree with each of Mr Weigel's wow gold lessons, but I'd like to reflect on the first:

Lesson One: The Tea Party isn't a small government-first movement. It was Sarah Posner who coined the term "Teavangelicals," a little neologism for a simple idea. The Tea Party, she argued, wow gold was not some new force of libertarians. It was a new framework for the same conservatives who dominated the GOP a month before the Tea Party began. Iowa may not have been the best place to test this, as its Republicans have always been more economically populist than not, and in the last decades they've been reliable social conservatives. But its Tea Partiers did not demand much economic libertarianism from their GOP. Sixty-four percent of caucus-goers called themselves "Tea Party supporters," and 30 percent of them backed Rick Santorum—a social conservative who proudly defended his earmarks. Rick Perry, who campaigned desperately on the issues Tea Partiers say they care about—no wow gold earmarks! Term limits! Part time Congress!—got 14 percent of this vote. Michele Bachmann got 9 percent of it.

 

If those sympathetic to the tea-party movement were really enthusiasts of small and limited government, one might think they'd see a lot to like in Ron Paul, the least compromising small-government advocate of the bunch. But caucusers who avowed the strongest affinity to the movement preferred even Newt Gingrich, an FDR-loving enthusiast of government-financed moon colonies, and heavily favoured Rick Santorum, a big-government "compassionate conservative" who is to George W. Bush basically what Pope Benedict XVI is to Pope John Paul II.Now, I think this wow gold is a bit of a fluke. I don't think Iowa's conservative voters really knew much about Rick Santorum's record or convictions. If they had, I doubt he would have done so well. What they did know for certain was that Mr Santorum is against abortion and same-sex marriage and was endorsed by Bob Vander Plaats, Iowa's social-conservative kingmaker. I doubt more than half of them knew Mr Santorum is Catholic. If Mr Santorum's surge had come earlier, Iowans surely would have seen more of this sort of thing

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