I don’t think anyone should take any of these guys seriously, whether it’s Glenn Beck OR Jon Stewart. There’s no difference between the two. They’re both a couple of bobblehead dolls that get paid a ton of cash to talk about politics, that’s it.
Glenn Beck may be some sort of representative of the Tea Party, but so what? The Tea Party won’t do shit once the general elections roll around. Yeah, sure they’ve mobilized some people, but nearly everyone they’ve mobilized already self-identifies as a conservative. In the general elections I suspect that, if anything, they’ll lose even worse than their more moderate partymates would have. Miller may win up in Alaska, but now that Luwarski or whatever the hell her name is has now begun her write-in campaign, Miller may still face a tough challenge. But what happens in Alaska is hardly representative of any trends developing across the country. The Tea Party candidates in Delaware and New York will get stomped on royally. I’m guessing something like 60% to 35%.
Given that the conservatives that make up the Tea Party were highly unlikely to vote for any candidate other than another conservative, I fail to see how the Tea Party is really changing anything but the GOP itself. They don’t appeal to, nor do they represent, most of mainstream America. According to a recent Gallup poll, 19% of Americans agree with the TP philosophy, but 63% completely disagree with it. Don’t foget: only about 10% of the registered electorate even voted in the primaries for the GOP and less than 5% voted in the Dem primaries. Primaries always bring out the more dedicated members of a party, and with a huge effort to change conservative politics like the Tea Party, the results of the primary are naturally going to be skewered in favor of the more activist section. But this Tea Party revolution within the GOP is not an indicator of future success in the general elections.
I don’t think this “insanity” that Jon Stewart aims to restore is even there. Obviously he’s referring to the TP element within the GOP when he says “insanity”, but the “sanity” that he hopes to restore is already there. When the media that most people get their news from is conservative (FoxNews, Limbaugh, Hannity, Wall Street Journal), then there’s a natural inclination to think that the country is headed down some hardline conservative path if you’re a liberal like Stewart.
But Stewart can’t do anything either. He’s just a guy who talks, like Beck. Beck isn’t mobilizing anything that wasn’t already there, he’s not mobilizing anything new, he certainly isn’t bringing any significant amount of moderates over and Stewart is the same. Gee, we’re going to bring back sanity! Well, it’s already here, if he assigns the label of “insanity” to the far right wing of the GOP. The people whose votes matter to “movements” are the moderates, because they have the ability to swing elections one way or the other. With the TP putting people who are further to the right than the people they beat in the primaries in general elections, the moderates don’t need to be mobilized; the Tea Party has essentially mobilized them by default.