Not simply writing outraged screeds, tweets, etc.
Do we have to wait until 2016? Is it a fatal flaw that we can't just summarily call up an election now like other democracies are able to do, instead of waiting and waiting months/years for next relevant election or recall?
I brooded evilly on this topic earlier today...
Perhaps if we were the Left version of the Koch Bros, we'd try to find a rich donor to independently finance the leftwing-astroturfed slate of candidates to go into Tea Party primaries and win? or more realistically, go into them and weaken against the Tea party enough to help 'moderate" R's win. [if you've been watching the political news lately, Wall Street and the Chamber of Commerce are starting to turn against the Tea Party. So is Karl Rove/Ham Rove.] This strategy could be so evil as to encourage folks to register Republican just to vote in primaries.
Since the banks and Powerful Rich Republicans want to tame the Tea Party, do we help them in an act of realpolitik? or avoid the association because it isn't really workable? I don't know, a lot of practical political ideas that could even work in cutthroat Renaissance Italy politics won't stand a chance in contemporary 'Murica.
...Or, we just sit back and wait for 2014 and 2016. We duplicate the strategies of Bill Clinton's Democratic Party after the Newt shutdown. We hang the shutdown around the GOP's neck, since they want to both celebrate the shutdown, and eschew it:
http://www.latimes.com/...
But these are heady times for the tea party.
“It’s amazing how we can be completely irrelevant and shut down Congress at the same time,” one of the movement’s early organizers, Mark Meckler, chortled at a Saturday evening gathering at the weekend state Republican party convention in Anaheim.
Minutes earlier, Tim Donnelly, a former Minuteman border watch leader who is the movement’s favored candidate for governor, rolled into the meeting to a standing ovation from nearly 200 tea party supporters.
“And they say the tea party is dead?” he opened.
The Tea Party isn't dead, it's just a zombie. and sometimes you have to be creative to kill zombies. I wonder if traditional electoral strategies are going to yield a Democratic sweep in Congress? Hopefully we don't have to go through 2 more terms of a GOP president in order to reclaim Congress again...