In the UK, where coverage of the midterm elections was exhaustive – the Guardian alone had a half-dozen post-election op-eds on Wednesday – much of the commentary and news sounded the death knells of Obama’s agenda and conveyed alarm about the tea party candidates’ victories. The Guardian said Obama faced a “hard political lesson after a hammering that wiped away the last vestiges of the euphoria that swept him to the White House."
Guardian columnist Michael Tomasky said that American liberals were “sternum-deep in their miry slough of despond” about the election of a man who said he would have opposed the 1964 civil rights act (Rand Paul) and several candidates who “hope to do away with public state pensions and any remotely meaningful limits on corporate power.” On the bright side, he said, “Americans have, however, stopped short of electing their first witch.”
But Alex Slater, noted that for many “reasonable” Republicans, the tea party victories were far from welcome:
Extreme Tea Partiers like Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O'Donnell in Delaware all but handed their elections to their Democratic opponents. Had reasonable Republicans run in those states, it might have turned out very differently and the Senate might have flipped to the Republicans – that was the conclusion being circulated in Republican circles last night. ...
One thing is clear: this isn't a sweeping mandate for Republicans. At best, it's a second chance after their 2008 rout. Unless they can reconcile the strident voices of their Tea Party movement candidates with listening to the strong message from Americans for conciliation, it's a second chance they're going to blow.
Meanwhile, in the Financial Times, there was still hope for Obama’s agenda, and the tea party was covered as a legitimate and popular part of the political climate, rather than a group of rogue politicians that could derail America. Christopher Caldwell writes:
So for Republican candidates there is no longer any such thing as being too close to the Tea Party. (Although Tea Party activists have presumably learnt a lesson about getting too close to candidates such as O’Donnell.)
A pessimistic Republican, however, might say that the organisational limits of the Tea Party have been revealed. The group’s strength is its leaderlessness, its informality, its lack of hierarchy, which makes it a powerful engine of grassroots organising. Possibly it is of less electoral use in situations that require co-ordinated action and complicated logistics, like a Senate race in a populous and varied state like Pennsylvania. For that sort of operation, a big corporate operation of the sort Republicans perfected under Karl Rove may still do the trick better. This could as easily be an argument for scaling the Tea Party up as for accepting its limitations.
And Martin Kettle urged readers to not draw too many parallels between the US and the UK’s political climates despite recent defeats of the center-left there:
You can trace this post-recession anti-incumbency mood in the defeat of Gordon Brown in May and other electoral setbacks for centre-left parties around the world over the past year. But don't push the comparison too far. America is a very different society from ours. The anti-government militant conservatism of the tea party, and the only slightly less confrontational Republican hierarchy, inhabit a different mental and political universe from the centrist, often socially liberal conservatism of David Cameron or Angela Merkel. There is no sign of a tea-party on this side of the Atlantic.
