2 area GOP candidates go gentle with tea party positions

Across the country, tea party candidates calling for fiscal accountability are testing, and sometimes besting, more moderate Republicans. Just this week, tea party-backed candidates won an upset victory in the Republican primary for Florida governor and apparently knocked off Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who campaigned on her ability to deliver federal cash for Alaska.

Has that led Republican candidates in Pennsylvania to drift further right to seize tea party voters?

For two GOP congressional candidates running in the Pennsylvania suburbs, the answer is no. Voter frustration with the economy has created a wave of disgruntled voters, and all the Republicans have to do is ride it, analysts say.

"Republican candidates understand that the overall political forces are with them . . . and they want to make this a nice, generally low-profile election," said John Kennedy, a political science professor at West Chester University.

Indeed, listing too far right and embracing some of the more radical tea party views - abolishing Social Security, the Department of Education, and the IRS, for example - would likely turn off moderate suburban voters and independents, said G. Terry Madonna, a professor, pollster and political analyst at Franklin and Marshall College.

"In the suburbs, that won't fly," he said. "You can oppose Obama, you can oppose the agenda, you can be against debts and deficits: That's the issue that, among independents, has grown."

Democratic strategists are using far-right candidates who have won GOP primaries to argue that the party is out of the mainstream, even in states like Pennsylvania where the tea party's influence on the Republican Party is less overt.

But so far, moderates in two suburban races seem to be doing just fine.

U.S. Rep. Jim Gerlach, a Republican who has won in some of the tightest races in the nation, opposes other tea party views, such as privatizing Social Security, yet the Independence Hall Tea Party PAC has endorsed him.

Gerlach, whose Sixth Congressional District encompasses parts of Montgomery, Chester and Berks Counties, voted against the stimulus and the health-care packages, which burnished his fiscal-conservative credentials with tea partiers. In his district, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by about 27,000, he doesn't need to lean any further right.

"I wouldn't be able to win this district with just Republican votes," Gerlach said in an interview Friday. "I have to win the support of independents and Democrats alike."

In the Seventh Congressional District, Democratic candidate Bryan Lentz has used the tea party as a weapon, but it hasn't budged his GOP opponent, Patrick Meehan.

Volunteers from Lentz's campaign helped a third-party candidate, Jim Schneller, who espouses tea party views, gather signatures to get on the ballot, ostensibly to either pull votes from Meehan or force him further to the right.

Lentz has tried in two successive debates to force Meehan to either embrace the tea party or forsake it.

"If you take the endorsement of the tea party and speak at their rallies, and they say they want to privatize Social Security and privatize Medicare, I think people have a right to know whether you agree with the tea party or disagree with the tea party," Lentz said during a debate last week.

Meehan, a former U.S. attorney, has no political votes to run away from or show off. He opposes privatizing or abolishing Social Security or Medicare, but he's happy to have the tea party talking about fiscal issues, which he said were the most important to voters in the district, which includes Delaware, Montgomery, and Chester Counties.

Meehan, like other mainstream Republican candidates, received backing from the Independence Hall Tea Party PAC.

"Oftentimes it seems it's more Democrat operatives that are talking about the tea party than real people out there in the streets," Meehan said at another debate Thursday. "At least here, in this district, when I'm talking to folks, they're not identifying with any sense of party, they're identifying with a sense of frustration."