Jonah Goldberg tries to explain the Tea Party movement as a “delayed Bush backlash” and claims that the prevailing attitude among Tea Partiers is that “we won’t be fooled again.” The first part of this might be true for the the 27% of Tea Partiers who view Bush unfavorably, but for the majority I doubt this is true. It might not be true in every case, but on the whole Bush’s 57% favorability rating probably came from those Tea Partiers who identify as Republicans (54%), and it is the remainder of mostly independents that has reservations or objections to Bush era policies. Partisan identification may not account for everything, but it explains the attitudes of at least a majority of those who identify with this movement.

As for not wanting to be fooled again, this is quite clearly not the case. If most Tea Partiers did not want to be fooled again, they would not enthusiastically latch onto the first pseudo-populist huckster who happens to say the things they like to hear. According to the survey, Palin’s favorability among Tea Partiers is at 66%, and her unfavorable rating is just 12%, which means that two-thirds of the anti-tax, anti-bailout, small-government protesters are extraordinarily well-disposed towards another under-prepared governor who sends all the right cultural signals. More to the point, this one has a short and unimpressive record of endorsing bailouts, hiking taxes and redistributing revenues to buy votes, and that was after she sank Wasilla into terrible debt before moving on. Of course, as with so many of her admirers, pro-Palin Tea Partiers must be uninterested in her actual record, because there is nothing in that record that an anti-tax, small-government conservative would find appealing.

I don’t doubt that the objections of most Tea Partiers are genuine and many of them were and are principled opponents of the policies they now decry when they happened earlier during a Republican administration. It’s just that most of those principled opponents were probably never Republicans, or they ceased being Republicans because of their objections. Partisan identification explains a large part of the pro-Palin sentiment, but it still cannot excuse the foolish enthusiasm for yet another deeply flawed Republican politician.