Tea Party predictions from top political analyst

OK, no news article this time. This is 100% moi. I'm posting one for posterity this time, making predictions about that ragtag group of modern Know-Nothings known as the Tea Parties. Or teabaggers, in the vernacular.

In 2010, a few Tea Party-identified GOP candidates will win. Then they will go on to run a government gaffe marathon and slowly be brow-beaten into "lamestream" Republicanism.

By 2012, they will be something like MoveOn.org: just a way to organize and fire up Republicans.

If Palin doesn't win in 2012 (whether she loses the nomination to Romney or some radical like Mike Pence, or loses to Obama), then by 2014, they will not exist. Oh, they'll have some web sites and stuff, but they'll stop mattering. Even today, more people's cats have web sites than Tea Party groups do.

Why will the Tea Parties fade away? Because, first of all, Republicans like winners and hate losers. (This goes along with their whole Social Darwinism thing; but in a larger sense I mean this as a compliment: Democrats take perverse pride in losing "for all the right reasons," whereas Republicans never see a good reason for losing.) If the Tea Parties are seen as a liability to conservatives winning future elections, then teabaggers themselves will scuttle the "movement."

The other reason that the Tea Parties will die out is that Republicans who win Congress (yes, I'm predicting that will happen, too) will have to take principled Tea-Party stands on issues or else compromise with dastardly lib'ruls, Obama, and RINOs. If they stand on principle in the House, then they will be irrelevant because of their small numbers. If they compromise, then the movement will become disillusioned and abandon them, and/or the movement. Tea Party candidates will morph seamlessly into old fashioned Republicans.

Of course, all you teabaggers are welcome to prove me wrong, but American political history has never been kind to third parties. Also, most teabaggers are old white people, and everybody knows old people hate change. Conservative old people hate change most of all. Hence, old white people will slip comfortably back into that warm, old, familiar pair of socks known as the GOP. -- Especially if some principled Tea Party candidate has the gall to touch the 3rd Rail of American Politics: old, white, conservative people's Social Security or Medicare.

And if you answer, "The Tea Parties were never meant to be a real party; they were meant to purify the Republican party," then I ask you to tally after the 2010 November elections how many of the 91 Republicans in the House and 33 Republicans in the Senate who voted for TARP lost their seats or failed to win the GOP's nomination, i.e. "got purified" by the Tea Parties.

Finally, most of the new health care program benefits will have kicked in by 2014, and some of those apathetic young slackers who fund the teabaggers' Big Gubument benefits with their FICA contributions might then realize that they like their health care just as much as the "Greatest Generation" and Baby Boomers love their Medicare/Medicaid. Then they might make the Tea Parties irrelevant the old fashioned way -- at the ballot box.