Macaca Tea
by digby
Apparently the tea partiers are on the hunt for the perfect candidates for 2012. According to Right Wing Watch, they find Virginia’s George “Macaca” Allen, with a 92.3 lifetime conservative rating, to be something of a socialist hippie.
Jamie Ratdke, who recently stepped down as chairwoman of the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation in order to explore a Senate bid, said she began to consider a run for the Senate after attending a Tea Party convention that featured Rick Santorum, Lou Dobbs, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinnelli as speakers:
Radtke said that she had considered running for the state Senate next year but that she began thinking about the U.S. Senate instead after Virginia’s first tea party convention, which drew an estimated 2,800 people to Richmond in October. Radtke, who worked for Allen for a year when he was governor and she was right out of college, said it’s time for a new candidate. She said that Allen was part of “George Bush’s expansion of government” when he was senator and that she was concerned about some of his stances on abortion. Allen has said that abortions should be legal in cases of rape, incest and when the life of the mother is endangered, and he owned stock in the manufacturer of the morning-after pill.
If George Allen is deemed not conservative enough for the Republican Party, then expect many more extremist candidates like Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell to win contested GOP primaries. Allen hurt his chances by supporting healthcare and education initiatives that were backed by President Bush and the Republican leadership, and is also deemed too moderate because he voted to include sexual orientation under hate crimes protections and believes in exceptions under a ban on abortion.
I keep hearing that these Tea Partiers don’t care about social issues. I don’t know why people think that.
Update: Scott Brown is having some similar problems with a group that headlines its dispatch: Pro-family Group Posts Detailed Expose On Brown In Bed With Gays
“I think that there will be a primary challenge,” said Christen Varley, president of the Greater Boston Tea Party. “There’s enough of an underground movement in the Tea Party movement as seeing him as not being conservative enough. There probably will be multiple people who attempt to run against him.”
Evidently, there are only about 15,000 registered Republicans in the state, so he could get the Mike Castle primary treatment. It remains to be seen if the Tea party remains a force in the GOP, but with Obama in the White House, I think they’ll stay relevant for a while. We’ll see if the establishment continues to fund them.
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