Will Mitt Romney Kill The Tea Party?

The free for all in the GOP presidential primary contest continues and even while Herman Cain is peaking in the polls, the premise is that he will be a flash in the pan as his ignorance about foreign policy and likely unworkable proposals become more widely know. Meanwhile, Rick Perry has not recovered from a combination of self-inflicted injuries and the fickleness of the loons that now comprise the Republican Part base. Thus, the issue becomes whether Mitt Romney - assuming he becomes the GOP nominee - will have the effect of driving a wooden stake through the cold and bitter heart of the Tea Party. Even as the Tea Party maligns the Occupy Wall Street movement, the Republican Party establishment seems Hell bent on blocking the nomination from going to the type of nutcase and ignoramus that seems to be favored by the Tea Party. A column in Huffington Post looks at the struggle within the GOP. Here are some highlights:

Herman Cain's rise in the polls this week doesn't change the fact that Mitt Romney is still the most likely Republican nominee for president, but it does underscore the biggest remaining question mark about him: If he wins the primary, will that kill the Tea Party?

FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe raised the prospect of a third party candidate if the former Massachusetts governor is the nominee, telling The New York Times this week that at the very least, a Romney candidacy would discourage conservative activism in the 2012 election.

But there were a surprising number who said they would work for the Republican nominee no matter who it is, even if it is Romney.

"Most people do not like Romney," said Dave Zupan, a Tea Party leader from the Cleveland suburbs. But, Zupan told The Huffington Post, "our goal is to beat Obama and flip the Senate. So if [Romney]'s the candidate, we're going to beat Obama with him and we're going to flip the Senate." "The Tea Party's going to show up for whoever's the candidate.

Zupan said that giving control of the Senate over to Republicans would be a way to hem Romney in, helping ensure he fulfills promises to conservatives such as repealing Obama's health law. The Romney campaign believes that unlike the 2008 election, when Democratic voters were spurred by passion for their candidate, Republicans will be motivated in 2012 not by personality but by their view of current circumstances.

Romney's brain trust is betting that conservatives like Puig will make up for what their candidate lacks in personal dynamism and conservative orthodoxy. "If Mitt Romney becomes the nominee, the entire party will rally behind him as the strongest leader on the paramount issue of our time -- putting America back to work," top Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told HuffPost. "He will then go on to defeat President Obama and begin the task of turning around a very troubled economy."

I suspect that Romney as the GOP is Barack Obama's worse case senario because as hard as Obama tries, it will be difficult to paint Romney as a scary figure - unless, of course, he pulls a John McCain and nominates a VP nominee like Sarah Palin. One would think that Romney would have learned from McCain's self-defeating VP choice.