American politics reached a milestone when Ronald Reagan, then the Republican presidential nominee, traveled to a convention of evangelical Christians in Dallas in August 1980 and said something mainstream politicians hadn’t been willing to say previously: “I want you to know I endorse you and what you are doing,” Mr. Reagan told the 15,000 or so conservative church leaders there assembled.
From that point on, the “religious right,” earlier seen by many as almost a fringe movement, became an important force within an ascendant Republican coalition.
Republicans today are trying something similar with the Tea Party movement. Yet even as Republicans relish this thought, it’s worth remembering that, just as their embrace of the religious right created occasional heartburn alongside electoral success, so too does their slow embrace of the Tea Party movement carry downside risks as well as upside potential.
In particular, Republicans’ courtship of the Tea Party movement threatens to pull the party away from its moorings on two crucial and emotional issues: the war on terror and immigration.
On the terror front, many Tea Partiers question the very notion of a war on terror, and see some law-enforcement policies adopted in its pursuit as unacceptable intrusions on American liberties. On immigration, the close-the-borders rhetoric common within the Tea Party movement runs counter to what many in the GOP hope will be a renewed outreach to Hispanics.
It’s a mistake, of course, to talk of a unified Tea Party position, for the movement is neither unified nor organized enough to have clear positions.
Clearly the movement is marked by hostility to big government, and to the health-care overhaul being championed by President Barack Obama and his Democratic party in Congress. Just as clearly, those impulses make the Tea Party phenomenon a net plus for Republicans. But the areas of disconnect have gotten less attention.
In significant sectors of the broad Tea Party movement, the war on terror, and the intelligence and law-enforcement policies originally crafted by the administration of Republican President George W. Bush to fight it, arouse sentiments ranging from suspicion to hostility.
As much as anything, the Tea Party movement is animated by antipathy toward government intrusions into private lives, and for many that extends toward intrusions with the stated goal of smoking out terrorists.
On that front, the movement in some respects has more in common with libertarians than with traditional Republicans such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, tireless champion of the Patriot Act and aggressive tactics in rooting out terrorist threats.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington two weeks ago—an annual gathering of conservative activists that this year had a distinct Tea Party overlay—one panel discussion was entitled “Why Real Conservatives are Against the War on Terror.”
In a paper prepared for that event, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer now a fellow at the American Conservative Defense Alliance declared: “Fear has been the key to the door for expansion of government and government powers and the people in charge in Washington have seized the opportunity. It has also eroded the liberties that have defined us as a nation.”
Similarly, the Web site of Oath Keepers, an organization of present and former military and law-enforcement personnel who say there are some government orders they won’t follow, declares: “We will NOT obey any order to detain American citizens as ‘unlawful enemy combatants’ or to subject them to trial by military tribunal.”
In one sign of how these tensions can divide, former Rep. Bob Barr got a combination of cheers and boos when he delivered a speech at the CPAC gathering urging that Americans “not be seduced by that siren of security over freedom.”
Immigration opens similar fissures between the Tea Party movement and the Republican establishment. That was clear when former Rep. Tom Tancredo, an outspoken advocate of a crackdown on immigration, was a prominent speaker at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville last month. In fact, his remarks were entitled, “Thank God John McCain Lost!”
Mr. Tancredo declared that if Republican nominee McCain had won last year’s presidential election, he and Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, “would have been posing in the Rose Garden with big smiles as they received accolades from La Raza for having finally passed an amnesty” for illegal immigrants. Moreover, he added, Mr. McCain and Mexican President Felipe Calderon “would be toasting the elimination of those pesky things called borders and major steps taken toward creation of a North American Union.”
That is cringe-producing rhetoric for Republicans who are straining to show they are, simultaneously, tough on illegal immigration yet empathetic with the nation’s growing bloc of Hispanic voters.
And yes, that’s important to, among others, Mr. McCain, who faces a tough election this year not for the White House, but to keep his Senate seat in Arizona, a state with a heavy Hispanic population.
As political parties have learned repeatedly over the years, the virtue of independent, grass-roots movements is that they can activate legions of previously apathetic voters. The problem with those independent movements is that they are exactly that—independent.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A2
