It bears remembering that the new Republican candidate for New York governor, Carl Paladino, won the nomination in a landslide, with abnormally high turnout for a primary. People really wanted to come out and vote for this guy. The story of his love of forwarding emails with vicious racist humor and mean-spirited pornography seems only to have improved his standing with the Republican base, as did the reveal that Paladino wants to put people in prison for "training" if they're unemployed. I mention this, because invariably people will not want to hold the voters responsible for his attitudes. On the contrary, I think he's an expression of the darkness that is in the Tea Party. The Tea Party revolt increasingly seems mostly motivated by anger at the Republicans for putting on a politically correct face instead of letting the bigot flag fly. Like Adam Serwer said, "If a liberal were trying to come up with a really nasty, reductive caricature of what a Republican is supposed to be like it would look something like Carl Paladino." I fear that may have been what made him so appealing to teabaggers.
