Masturbation and Bike Paths Could Be Obama’s Salvation

The tea party scurries from one primary victory to the next, but its crude views may turn off some crucial voters in the national election.

The hour of revenge draws nigh. In exactly one month, American voters will rearrange the Washington power map when they cast their ballots in the congressional elections. Opposition Republicans are buoyed by the prospect of decimating Barack Obama and his Democrats on Nov. 2. But the Republicans certainly look like a disorderly heap this year, with their slate of eccentric candidates who are tripping over their own tongues with the dubious statements they’re making as election day approaches.

The day of the outsider has arrived. Connecticut Republican Senate candidate Linda McMahon, head of the World Wrestling Federation, has an Internet spot in which she is shown heartily kicking a man in the groin. Christine O’Donnell, candidate for the Senate in Delaware, has so far become famous for her opposition to masturbation and her unpaid debts. Dan Maes, who is running for governor of Colorado, is calling the growing number of bike paths in the United States a United Nations plot to weaken America.

Sharron Angle, Nevada’s Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, has publicly hinted that there could be an armed popular uprising against the U.S. government, a right she says is guaranteed by the Constitution. Rand Paul, Republican Senate candidate from Kentucky, rejects the civil rights legislation of the ‘60s as an unauthorized intervention of the government into an individual’s right to discriminate against minorities.

What unites all these candidates is their contempt for the Washington political establishment in general and Barack Obama’s liberal policies in particular. Supported by a loosely allied archconservative base calling itself the tea party, they have managed to get nominated for high office against the wishes of the Republican Party establishment. These candidates all see the United States becoming a socialist state under Obama’s leadership. Their mission, they believe, is to prevent that happening at all costs.

Policy expert Eric Alterman, of the liberal think-tank “Center for American Progress” in Washington, D.C., categorizes the tea party candidates as highly irrational and even hysterical. Democratic Party leader Tim Kaine says that moderate positions no longer have a place among Republicans, and even Karl Rove, former advisor to President George W. Bush, is quoted as saying that Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell has said some “nutty things.”

Many Democrats believe the Republicans have done themselves a disservice by running such a slate of conservative eccentrics. A number of Senate seats that were previously vulnerable to Republican takeover could now go to the Democrats. Those politically moderate voters who will tip the scales may find these Republican outsiders too extreme for their tastes.

Brookings Institute policy analyst William Galston believes the external conditions may favor the Republicans. Slow economic growth, high unemployment and Obama’s declining popularity may cause considerable losses among Democrats, he predicts. But first the public will have to determine whether they will tolerate the views of the tea party candidates which Galston describes as “out-of-the-mainstream.” Recent surveys show the Republicans have a good chance of recapturing the House of Representatives, something that would considerably reduce Obama’s power base.