Angry American voter

Just what does the stunning victory of Christine O'Donnell, Tea Party darling and Sarah Palin protegee, mean for the Republican Party? That was the question being asked across official Washington on Wednesday, where many livelihoods depend on the answer. It was also entirely the wrong thing to focus on.

O'Donnell's selection in a primary as the party's candidate for Delaware — and the victories of six other Tea Partiers against the leadership's candidates — is about much more than the battle for the Senate, or even who will be in the White House after 2012.

O'Donnell is a party apparatchik's nightmare. Although attractive and personable — there is a physical as well as a political resemblance to Palin — she is a flawed candidate who will struggle against her Democratic opponent in November's midterm elections.

A strong social conservative, who promotes fiscal conservatism, she appears to have chaotic personal finances and once filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit claiming gender discrimination against a conservative group she had worked for.

It was later dropped.

O'Donnell could grow as a candidate but thus far she has shown she is not ready for prime time. Her television appearances have been as painful as Palin's interviews with Katie Couric in 2008, showing her to be ill-prepared and only vaguely familiar with key policy areas. Yet the point to take from Delaware is that none of this really matters.

To say that voters are angry is an understatement. They are furious, disgusted and resentful. They are fed up of being told by besuited party honchos and professional politicians whom they should vote for, and what they should think.

Representative Mike Castle, O'Donnell's primary opponent in Delaware, was the victim of a political throat-slitting on Tuesday. Castle represented almost everything Tea Party activists loathe: a soggy centrist, he has held elected office of some kind since 1965 — four years before O'Donnell was born.

No surprise

The reaction of establishment figures to O'Donnell's win was as predictable as it was misguided. Karl Rove, former Svengali to George W Bush, branded her "nutty". Senate Republicans, who trashed her in the primary campaign, announced they would not fund their new nominee.

Rove's point may be substantively correct, and in terms of allocating the party's resources, not funding O'Donnell makes some sense. But the response showed an arrogance that will fuel the outrage Republicans should be trying to harness.

Democrats are even more out of touch. The prevailing sentiment among them is gloating that they will now win Delaware, and keep a narrow majority in the Senate — something they forget is close to worthless, as a 60-40 majority is needed to achieve anything. Moreover, their tactic of portraying the Tea Party as racist loons is likely to be disastrous.

Mocking populist sentiment in this atmosphere will see Democrats punished at the polls far more severely than Republicans. There are certainly some eccentric characters at Tea Party events, but the vast majority are small-government conservatives who think Washington is corrupt, complacent and working for itself.

Those feelings have only been exacerbated by President Obama's policies: elected on a wave of anti-Bush feeling, he interpreted the desire for something different as a mandate for a vast expansion of government, piling trillions on to the already swollen national debt.

In Florida the other day, I saw a home-made sign tied to the front gate of a modest home in a black neighbourhood. ‘No more big plans with my money', it declared. That's the essence of the Tea Party message — and it has huge resonance.

Ironically, a strong Tea Party presence in Congress is likely to lead to further legislative gridlock, especially if there is no rapprochement with the Republican establishment.

In 2012, Obama could win re-election with no real mandate at all. That would only fuel the outrage of the Tea Partiers and reinforce their darkest suspicions. In such circumstances, a major realignment of American politics would be inevitable.