On the plus side, thanks to people like Walsh whatever bite the race card once had has been completely vanquished.
Via Salon:
. . . To know what it really means, it would help to define what the Tea Party meant in 2010, and today. Chris Hayes came as close as anyone to defining it during his MSNBC election coverage Tuesday night: opposition to “runaway” government spending, particularly the 2009 stimulus, combined with hatred of “Obamacare” as the ultimate symbol of big Democratic government.
That seemed correct, but Hayes left out one thing: irrational, implacable hostility to Obama himself, often fed by a wellspring of conscious and unconscious racism. The Obama election, combined with the Tea Party backlash, served to make the GOP clearly and unmistakably the party of white people, and it doesn’t look like that will change any time soon.
But in a few years, the GOP will lose the galvanizing and unifying issue of Barack Hussein Obama. It may be that some of the decline in the popularity of the Tea Party “brand,” even among even Republican voters, relates to that: More people recognize that hate him or not, the president won two elections, and he’s (probably) not going anywhere, rumblings about impeachment notwithstanding. Meanwhile, GOP voters know, because the GOP establishment has spent a lot of money telling them so, that the Tea Party cost Republicans control of the Senate. “Tea Party” no longer conjures up brave patriots in bright costumes, but losers who’ve cost the party elections, and whose Obama hatred not only failed to vanquish Obama but tainted the entire party with a toxic smog of racism.