Tea Party Loses Its Edge

“Erick Erickson built his career on stoking populist rage. But now the man who steers the Tea Party says conservative anger has grown toxic and self-defeating,” Molly Ball reports.

“Erickson sounded almost gleeful as he told me about the Tea Party hating him. He seems to delight in confounding expectations, and in almost every way, he refuses to be pigeonholed: he is a southerner who defines himself by his small-town sensibility, but he spent most of his childhood in Dubai. He speaks for the conservative grass roots, but he pals around with cable-news regulars and Beltway elites. He’s a strict no-compromises ideologue, but during his one foray into elected office, he was a model of bipartisan cooperation.”