Cantor's fall and the Tea Party dialectic

The swift and unexpected political demise of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.) at the hands of his own party’s primary electorate last night has already called forth endless analysis. Beaten by an economics professor who ran on a shoestring and whose major source of institutional support came from talk radio hosts, Cantor has been charged variously with focusing too much on preparing to be the next House speaker, with running an ineffective campaign that spent no money on voter contact but $200,000 on steakhouses, with being too soft on immigrants (Cantor proposed a path to legal status for immigrants brought into the country illegally as children), and with being too negative and unfair in his campaign ads. There is even speculation that Cantor was defeated by Democrats voting in Virginia’s open primary.

Whatever the mix of factors, the primary defeat of a House majority leader—something that has apparently never happened in the 115-year history of that office—indicates a politician, and a party, caught sleeping by a restless electorate.

And there is a special irony in Cantor losing to a challenger widely identified with the Tea Party. Cantor's rise to the leadership coincided with the rise of the Tea Party itself, and in those long-ago days of the Democratic House majority he pioneered the strategy of uniform and unyielding opposition to President Obama’s legislative agenda. Cantor brought Tea Party groups to the Capitol to protest the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, and when Republicans took over the majority he was a magnet for conservative discontent with Speaker John Boehner.