I note you use the present tense, but it would not change much for this to change. If for instance the US went back into recession.
Now was it GWB who said a week or so back that she was not qualified to be president? She has no backing anywhere. Even among the most racist and nationalistic groups she is considered a featherhead with neither ideas nor solutions. Granted, a contemporary US president is largely a figurehead, a marionette who dances to the tune of those who backed him and thus own him. But even such marionettes need a modicum of intelligence. She lacks it.
If you can endure it, listen to this vapid woman speaking. There ain't nothin' there. It's all slogans, banal cliches. Even apparatchiks like GWB and Obama have some basic intelligence. But time will decide whether my prognosis is correct.
The US, incidentally, is not out of its economic quagmire, which is structural in nature, and which seems to involve a tectonic shift in economic power to Asia. For tens of millions of Americans there has been no "recovery" (though in some narrow statistical sense, the country may be out of "recession").
I wasn't saying "smart", America has one of the highest illiteracy rates in the developed world, and thus about the highest rate of religious observance. The Tea party is not short of money at all.
Without financial backing a candidate -- whether for Congress, Senate, or the Oval Office -- is dead. The sums of money need for successful campaigns have increased by orders of magnitude from, say, fifty years ago. The voters are needed just to dance to the tune of political pied pipers who are funded by an oligarchy. That is incidentally why no candidate with progressive leanings can win office. It's a pay-to-play political system in which those who back candidates expect high returns on their investments. See politics as a business in the US, where voters -- the stupider the better -- are coralled at election time and offered narrow "choices." In this sense, as Tom Ferguson points out in his book "The Golden Rule," big money decides who the candidates are going to be and what agenda is going to be presented to the electorate.
The Tea Party is backed by billionaires with their own reactionary agenda. Otherwise it is nothing, all smoke and mirrors, no substance, no ideology (except slogans of "smaller government"). If it ever by some miracle becomes more than that (i.e., a media-concocted spectacle) it will be as a reactionary faction of a reactionary Republican party.
Also, the US electoral system is highly polarizing towards candidates that are favoured by activists. The Tea party are a huge obsessive gang of activists, enough to swamp anything in their path. That may go up or down of course in the next year, but my bet is on support going up.
Yes, the system perhaps is polarising a bit, just as it did in the dying days of Weimar, when the only two parties in business became the Communists and the Nazis. But the Tea Partiers are not Nazis, who were a serious lot, and who under people like Hitler and Strasser had some ideas about the economy, society, and foreign policy.
The Tea party is a "fundamentalist" outfit in the sense that they want to pursue ideals without compromise or as they would see it, becoming part of the Washington elite. That means anyone who has actual experience of anything is necessarily tainted in their eyes. Palin can thus remain ideologically pure, and since her ideology is anything she happens to say she has great freedom of action.
I've heard this refrain for decades. When Carter and Reagan ran their campaigns it was as "outsiders." Whether it will still wash is something I'm not clear about.
I perceive a huge momentum behind anti-incumbency from all sides. The Republicans were in office when this mess was caused, and most people aren't that convinced that the Democrats have actually done much to help and the debt / inflation scares them.
In these difficult times, people's attention is focused on the real differences between the two parties. And frankly there isn't much to choose between.
Anyway, this is drifting off topic from immigration.
Mea culpa. During hard times attitudes towards immigration tend to harden. That is happening in the US, though it is nowhere close to the levels of Germany, France, and (now) Britain. In Germany just look at the reception Thilo Sarrazin's statements have received ....
