Joe Scarborough: Tea Party Alive and Kicking

The tea party movement is alive and well, despite non-stop attacks from Democrats over its three-year existence, says Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

In a Politico column, he offers a laundry list of tea partyers’ accomplishments, saying they "energized a conservative movement battered by eight years of bloated Republicanism."

Other key accomplishments of the conservative groups include:

• they shocked the political world by taking Ted Kennedy’s seat;
• they put Obama Democrats in a constant defensive crouch;
• they led the resistance against Obamacare;
• they helped bring about the largest legislative landslide in U.S. history in 2010;
• they grabbed six seats in the U.S. Senate that year;
• they helped elect six governors;
• they helped win 700 seats in state legislatures; and
• they helped elect a Republican majority that included the largest number of Republicans elected since 1946.

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Scarborough, who served four terms in the House of Representatives as a Republican from Florida, borrows a word from Vice President Joe Biden to sum up Democrats’ attacks on the tea party. “The general theme that the tea party has been bad for the GOP is pure malarkey,” he wrote.

The tea party’s success is historic, Scarborough says. “Whether opinion leaders like it or not, the tea party helped engineer a Republican landslide, reframed the national debate and put the president so far back on his heels that even Mitt Romney has a chance to be president. That in itself is pretty remarkable.”