Outsider Tea Party candidates aim to derail Obama's agenda (Feature)

By Chris Cermak Oct 29, 2010, 3:56 GMT

Deerfield Beach, Florida - In his closing argument to Florida voters, US Senate candidate Marco Rubio describes his parents fleeing the communist island of Cuba and prospering in the United States.

Rubio then issues an ominous warning: the choice in this election is either to preserve America's exceptionalism or 'to become more like the place my parents came from.'

Rubio, 39, is considered one of the brightest spots coming out of a conservative grassroots movement, widely known as the Tea Party, that is poised to wield major political influence in Washington after US congressional elections Tuesday.

The movement's success has come from harnessing a wave of voter anger over a sluggish economy and President Barack Obama's policies that appears likely to help the centre-right Republican Party regain control of at least one of the two chambers of Congress.

The Tea Party-backed candidates are promising to do everything in their power to derail Obama's left-leaning agenda if elected to office. Suggestions from this conservative group that Obama is a socialist, or even a communist, are not uncommon.

'We are at a tipping point,' Allen West, a Tea Party favourite running for the House of Representatives in southern Florida, told the German Press Agency dpa.

He predicted that the United States could be headed for the kind of violent protests currently seen in France and Greece.

West, who regularly slams Obama's 'tyrannical government' and 'socialist agenda,' is running neck-and-neck with Democratic Party incumbent Ron Klein.

Analysts say that up to 33 Tea Party-linked Republicans could be elected to the 435-seat House of Representatives and another eight to the 100-member Senate. Their scathing attacks against Obama's agenda have many fearing gridlock in Congress in the coming years.

Most Tea Party candidates, including Rubio and West, have vowed to dismantle Obama's existing achievements, halting the government's stimulus spending and repealing the hard-fought health insurance overhaul that aimed to expand coverage to about 30 million uninsured people.

But the fresh batch of conservative lawmakers will also face an uneasy coalition with incumbent Republicans who could be open to compromise with Obama on some issues, especially for reviving the economy.

'There will be a period of time in the Republican caucus where there will be some friction,' Ken Buck, Republican nominee for Senate in Colorado, told the magazine National Journal.

Rubio and Buck are among a large crop of Tea Party-backed candidates who ran outsider campaigns to unseat more established Republicans in primaries earlier this year.

Their rise was fueled by a backlash against incumbents from both parties. Polling has shown higher approval ratings for the Tea Party movement than for the work in Congress of either political party.

'Throw them all out!' said Bob Dimario, a 64-year-old retired Californian vacationing on Florida's Atlantic coast.

Sympathizing with the Tea Party's outsider stance, he said members of Congress become 'corrupt' over time and should be limited to eight years in office.

The tilt toward uncompromising outsiders has hurt Republican chances in some moderate states. But in a mid-term election where only about one third of the electorate is expected to vote, the Tea Party has managed to energize the Republicans' conservative base and helped give the conservative party a significant edge coming into Tuesday's voting.

A recent Gallup opinion poll found that 55 per cent of likely voters rated themselves Republican or leaning Republican, compared to just 40 per cent for Obama's centre-left Democrats. The margin is much wider than in any other recent mid-term election, including the 1994 landslide that saw Republicans capture both chambers of Congress for the first time in decades.

That enthusiasm has catapulted Tea Party-favoured candidates into surprisingly strong showings against Democrats, who have sought to portray the upstart group as an extremist bloc that lies outside of the public mainstream.

In Nevada, Republican Sharron Angle is running close against Harry Reid, the Democrats' leader in the Senate and top quarry for conservatives.

Tea Party candidates are polling strongly even in some three-way races where more moderate Republicans, knocked off in primaries by their conservative challengers, are waging independent campaigns. The polling contracts the conventional wisdom of a split conservative vote handing easy victory to Democrats.

Rubio holds a double-digit lead over both Florida's Republican Governor Charlie Crist, now an independent, and Democrat Kendrick Meek. In Alaska, Joe Miller is running neck-and-neck with incumbent Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski, who launched a write-in campaign to keep her seat after losing the Republican primary to Miller.

Tea Partiers charge that Obama has allowed the budget deficit to skyrocket, spending hundreds of billions of dollars in government stimulus measures while next summer, failing to bring unemployment down from near 10 per cent.

The movement has tapped into a growing anti-government sentiment running through the country, as Obama has struggled to pull the US economy out of last year's deep recession. The White House has pleaded for more time, arguing it has halted the slide.

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