Thomas Frank: Pity the Quarter-Billionaire: An Open Letter to the Tea Party

Take a Ride on the RINO in 2012
By Thomas Frank

Dear Tea Party Movement,

For the last few months, the world has been fascinated by your frenzied search for a presidential candidate who is not Mitt Romney. We know that you find the man inauthentic and that you have buoyed up a string of anti-Mitts in the Iowa polling -- Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich -- buffoons all, preposterous figures whom you have rightfully changed your minds about as soon as you got to know them.

It was quite a spectacle, your quest for the non-Romney -- and I think we all know why you undertook it. In ways that matter, Romney is clearly a problem for you. His views on abortion, for example, change with the winds. Ditto, gay rights. He designed the Massachusetts health insurance system that was the model for Obamacare. And he’s even said that he approved of the TARP bank bailout, the abomination that ignited the Tea Party uprising in the first place.