Tea Party favorite Christine O’Donnell now polls ahead of establishment Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware’s GOP Senate contest. That won’t be welcome news to the Weekly Standard, which yesterday ran a lengthy item about her colorful history.

On the simplest level, the neoconservative organ’s concern is merely partisan — if O’Donnell wins the primary, she’ll probably lose in November and deprive the Republicans of a pickup that Castle could have delivered. And who knows, that seat could prove pivotal in deciding control of the Senate.

But there’s more at stake beyond the obvious. A quick Republican turnaround after the party’s losses in 2006 and 2008 promises to efface the memory of what went wrong under George W. Bush — and thereby save the neocons’ reputations. Saved too will be the Republican congressional leadership, which shows no indication of having learned any lessons from the catastrophes of the past decade. For McConnell, Boehner, and friends, retaking Washington means returning to business as usual: deficit spending (complete with an utterly symbolic war on “earmarks”), hyping of foreign threats, and everything else that falls under the cheery rubric of “national-greatness conservatism.”

That’s something Bill Kristol would fondly like to see. But for his dream to come true, the Tea Party will have to be strictly stage managed: all that anti-establishment, anti-government talk is fine, as long as it helps elect more Republicans. If the Tea Partiers take it all too seriously, though, to the point where it jeopardizes the big comeback — well, then it’ll be time to call a kook a kook.

The First State may or may not be a special case, but in general the traditional conservative interest runs in the opposite direction: let the Tea Parties go wild. The GOP deserves a good shakeup, and the wilder elements of Tea Party may be a means to that end. And for the grassroots, the ability to distinguish between candidates who are anti-establshment and those who are frankly nuts may be better acquired through experience than by heeding the Beltway sages who gave us Bush (and, by extension, Obama).