Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System
by Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen
Harper, 336 pp.

ou don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that the Tea Party is going to get an awful lot of attention in the run-up to the midterm elections. Or that the locus of attention is going to be cable television. This presents an opportunity. Someone is going to have to appear night after night to expound, in grave and urgent tones, upon what the Tea Party movement “means.” Someone will have to assume the role of expert. Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen, veteran pollsters who don’t shy away from the camera, would like to be that someone. Their new book, Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System, styles itself as scholarly analysis buttressed with “proprietary” polling data and other bells and whistles. But it’s really a job application for Chief Tea Party Talking Heads.

To land the job, you must come equipped to justify, and if possible amplify, the latest media fixation. The authors’ first order of business, then, is to establish that the Tea Party movement is very, very important and to play up to its members’ vision of themselves as political actors of historic consequence. Rasmussen and Schoen do this mainly through repeated assertion and a clamor of superlatives. The Tea Party, they claim, is “the most energetic and powerful force of its time,” “one of the most powerful and extraordinary movements in recent political history,” “the most potent force in American politics, with the potential to fundamentally change America,” “America’s most vibrant political force,” and one that “may even be powerful enough to elect the next president of the United States.” And all of this in the first few pages! It’s enough to induce a powerful headache.

The Tea Party is certainly significant, though sweeping claims about its transformative power are premature. To date, the disgruntled Republicans, frustrated independents, and pox-on-both-houses malcontents who make up its membership have served mainly to help the Democrats by defeating mainstream candidates in GOP primaries in upstate New York, Kentucky, and Nevada. This could change in a hurry, and there is some grounds for thinking that it may. In Texas, the mainstream Republican governor, Rick Perry, refashioned himself as a true believer and easily fended off a primary challenge from Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, once considered the favorite. If other Republicans can manage to harness this activist energy, then the Tea Party really could become a force to reckon with. A book that carefully examined the movement’s origins and made clear what its members plan to do if indeed they seize control of the government would have been truly valuable.

Had Rasmussen and Schoen written such a book, their hyperbole could be overlooked. But they didn’t. Instead, they are mostly content to pass along the conventional wisdom that anyone who watches cable news or reads a newspaper can probably recite from memory: that a combination of economic dislocation, frustration with Washington, declining living standards, and loss of faith in the American dream have produced an angry, fearful electorate. Rasmussen and Schoen do this mainly from a point of view hostile to liberals. On the issue of legislative gridlock, for instance, “Democrats have been stymied at every turn by the rampant partisanship that President Obama has failed to stem.” Well, that’s one way of looking at it.

The most useful part of Mad as Hell is its attempt to place the Tea Party in historical context. “The right-wing populism we are experiencing today,” they write,

is significant because it represents the conjoining of three separate, distinct, and not easily reconcilable strands of conservatism: economic conservatism, small-government conservatism, and social conservatism. Historically, these strands have not worked in concert. And occasionally they have even been at odds. But in 2009, they seemed to converge under the broad umbrella of the Tea Party movement.

The authors attribute this convergence to two major shifts in American society. The first is an economic displacement that has kept median wages stagnant since 1980, while enormous wealth has accrued to those at the top of the income ladder. The second is a sudden political shift under Obama that has caused independents to pull to the right.

This political diagnosis mostly rings true. Where the book suffers is in its insistence on imbuing these trends with world-historic significance well before they’ve had a chance to play out. Given the Tea Party’s dubious record to date, it’s a little silly to claim, as Rasmussen and Schoen do, that “a once-in-a-century realignment has occurred, yet no one today seems to know it.”

This exaggeration seems less a matter of the authors’ not understanding what’s going on, and more a desire to hype the Tea Party movement so as to increase their own prospects as experts who can talk about it with Glenn Beck. That may be why their writing tends to be cast in the form of declarative, television-friendly sound bites. In fact, the book’s entire format uncannily resembles that of Hardball and other political shout shows. It’s padded throughout with page after page of long, often multiple-paragraph, quotes from pundits and columnists criticizing or valorizing the Tea Party. These are used as a device to allow the authors to chide liberal critics and praise conservative supporters, thereby establishing their allegiance to the movement. It gets old quickly.

Rasmussen and Schoen are so eager to reinforce every claim about the Tea Party’s fearsome potential, and so frequently heedless of how they do so, that they come across as unreliable. One tenet of Tea Party orthodoxy, for instance, is that its membership comprises not only Republicans embarrassed about George W. Bush, but legions of Democrats and independents—an idea the authors push hard, claiming that as many as a third of Tea Party activists were Obama supporters. Elsewhere they appear to claim that a third are liberals. But they also assert that “the Tea Party movement is clearly avowedly conservative.”

Another confidence-sapping feature is the body of “proprietary data” billed prominently throughout. Most authors would be more modest than to write, “Needless to say, the qualitative and quantitative data we have gathered is deeply fascinating, highly troubling, and politically portentous.” That’s setting the bar high. But the data are none of these things. Rasmussen and Schoen place great emphasis on the class divide between political elites and mainstream Americans, which they claim to illuminate with a gimmicky Political Class Index that they have devised to determine who falls into which category. The questions are so mindless that they undermine any faith that the reader may have brought to the project. Sample question: “Do government and big business often work together in ways that hurt consumers and investors?” Answer “yes” and you’re in the mainstream, “no” and you’ve revealed yourself as a member of the political elite. As a Washington reporter, I certainly qualify by Rasmussen and Schoen’s standards as a member of the “political elite.” But I would answer “yes,” since I can think of dozens of examples. Most readers will find themselves constantly thinking, “Wait a minute—this is their proprietary research?!”

Occasionally, the authors’ claims are defeated within the very same sentence in which they appear. “The roots of the Tea Party can be traced back to the social and economic movements, beginning with Barry Goldwater and spanning the latter half of the 20th century,” they write. I’m no scholar, but I’d wager that a movement named for events that took place in 1773, and whose members revel in the costumes and pageantry of the American Revolution, traces its lineage a bit further back than Goldwater.

When we look back at the 2010 elections, I suspect we’ll want to know what made the various strands of conservatism converge so suddenly. For all their ungrounded certainty, the authors of Mad as Hell don’t seem to know a whole lot more than anybody else. But that never stopped anyone from being an expert on cable television.