Is the Tea Party out to banish Bush-style conservatism?
Will the Tea Party sell out for a mess of pottage in the form of a ban on earmarks?
That’s one possibility. But another is that this embrace of a purely symbolic approach to deficit reduction is a sign that the Tea Party’s central goals may lie elsewhere - in an effort to push the Republican Party away from those aspects of George W. Bush’s legacy that tried to steer the conservative movement in a new direction. The real point may be to get the GOP to say goodbye to the idea of a compassionate conservatism and to Bush’s peculiar but real brand of multiculturalism.