GOP's Useful Idiot

Frank Rich offers an insightful look at the useful idiocy of Delaware Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell to the GOP in The New York Times.

While O’Donnell’s résumé has proved largely fictional, one crucial biographical plotline is true: She has had trouble finding a job, holding on to a home and paying her taxes. In this, at least, she is like many Americans in the Great Recession, including the angry claque that found its voice in the Tea Party. For a G.O.P. that is even more in thrall to big money than the Democrats, she couldn’t be a more perfect decoy.

By latching on to O’Donnell’s growing presence, the Rove-Boehner-McConnell establishment can claim it represents struggling middle-class Tea Partiers rather than Wall Street potentates and corporate titans. O’Donnell’s value is the same as that other useful idiot, Michael Steele, who remains at the Republican National Committee only because he can wave the banner of “diversity” over a virtually all-white party that alternately demonizes African-Americans, Latinos, gays and Muslims.

O'Donnell's bogus resume and wacky public statements provide cover for such Tea Party candidates as Joe Miller and Ken Buck (who really did attend elite schools), and Rick Scott, Rand Paul, Carly Fiorina and Carl Paladino who are all sufficiently wealthy that they lack populist Tea Party cred. O'Donnell's comedy also masks the astroturf funding the movement receives from the GOP's true constituents, the very wealthy, as detailed by Jane Mayer's recent expose on the Koch brothers in The New Yorker.

Rich concludes:

Everyone knows that tax cuts for the G.O.P.’s wealthiest patrons must come out of Social Security and Medicare payments for everybody else. They are acing it, these guys. Election Day is now only a month away. The demoralized Democrats are held hostage by the unemployment numbers. And along comes this marvelous gift out of nowhere, Christine O’Donnell, Tea Party everywoman, who just may be the final ingredient needed to camouflage a billionaires’ coup as a populist surge. By the time her fans discover that any post-election cuts in government spending will be billed to them, and not the Tea Party’s shadowy backers, she’ll surely be settling her own debts with fat paychecks from “Fox & Friends.”

UPDATE: The counter-argument to this is that many independent voters may see O'Donnell and her Tea Party ilk as proof the GOP has become too wacky and extreme. Josh Marshall discusses tightening poll results on Talking Points Memo.

--Ballard Burgher