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Politico tells us that Tea Partiers are wondering what to do if Mitt Romney becomes the GOP nominee:
"I honestly don’t know whether the movement will perform well" in the presidential election, said Mark Meckler, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, a national coalition of local groups. "I don't think anybody is looking for a third party candidate, but anybody who would count out that possibility, I just think is ignorant."Kibbe is right on the last point, but the idea that the Tea Party is going to run a third party candidate is just ridiculous. All of their influence comes from being inside the Republican party, forcing its leaders to fear them and make policy concessions to them. Leave the party, and all that leverage is gone. The most notable thing about the GOP primary race at the moment is how weak everyone but Romney looks. Romney is on top of the polls and he's outraising everyone else. The next couple of contenders are an ill-informed, somewhat crazy former business executive, and an ill-informed, somewhat crazy congresswoman, neither of whom would have any chance at all of defeating Barack Obama. Meanwhile, Tim Pawlenty, whom lots of smart people thought had a great chance to be the nominee, is at about 5 percent, and his fundraising has been so anemic that many of his staffers have been working without pay. It's always foolish to assume that everything will stay the way it is in the earliest stages of a primary. Who knows -- we could see Buddy Roemer catch fire, or Rick Perry could get in the race, or any of a hundred things could happen. But Tea Partiers looking around today are probably trying to get themselves used to Mitt Romney as their standard-bearer. And guess what: they will! If Romney is the nominee, by the time we get to next October they'll be saying with complete sincerity that he's a dream, and things will be so much better when he beats that evil Obama, and working their little hearts out to get him elected. Because the alternative will be to make themselves completely irrelevant.Another tea party leader, Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, describes the presidential election as a potential "Achilles heel" for the movement, which arose in 2009 in opposition to what its activists saw as unchecked government spending and expansion under President Barack Obama.
"Our power comes from the fact that we're not dependent on anybody to be the leader," Kibbe told POLITICO, conceding the tea party's diffuse and decentralized nature may be better suited to congressional races than presidential politics.
