Hype or perish: how to become a cable TV expert on the Tea Party when there's really nothing new to say.

• Author: Green, Joshua
• Position: 'Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System' - Book review

Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System

by Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen

Harper, 336 pp.

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You 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...