Romney's tea party crashing

Rick Santorum's decision to quit the presidential race last week clarified a number of things: Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee; the general election will be closer; and for the second cycle in a row, the conservative activists who make up the GOP's base are going to get stiffed.

This is not how the 2012 Republican primary was supposed to unfold. When the race unofficially got under way 18 months ago, the tea party was at the peak of its influence, having just handed Republicans control of the House. The GOP presidential field was scrambling to appeal to the party's new source of power. Candidates like Tim Pawlenty — a pleasant, competent technocrat during his two terms as governor of Minnesota — awkwardly recast themselves as fire-breathing deficit warriors.

Romney never did, and in hindsight that has proved wise. For all the clamor that rose up around the tea party, its lasting influence was plainly exaggerated. Santorum's exit underscores the fact that a lot less has changed in national politics than anyone who picked up a newspaper or tuned into cable news over the last two years might have supposed. Four years after settling for John McCain, Republicans are about to settle for Mitt Romney.

But it would also be wrong to write off the tea party's influence altogether. Washington's fixation on deficits these last two years, even as the ailing economy was in need of further support, is testimony to its supporters' ability to bend the nation's attention toward their goals. It's unlikely, for example, that the $2.1 trillion in savings signed into law last summer would have been imposed absent intense grassroots pressure.

Contrary to popular perception, even the recent return of social issues like contraception owes some debt to the tea party. Though it's best known for libertarian economic views, an analysis last year by the Pew Research Center found its supporters also hold strongly conservative opinions about issues like abortion and gay marriage.

But despite their abundance of passion and flair for political theater, these activists ultimately lacked the skills to make one of their own the Republican nominee. From Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann to Herman Cain to Rick Perry and finally to Santorum, none of the tea party-anointed candidates lasted very long or showed much capacity to be a serious leader.

Although the primary rules disfavored Romney and drew out the process in a way that magnified his weaknesses, his strong organizational and fund-raising skills let him wear down rivals who elicited considerably more passion from the base. In the end, it wasn't the new grassroots enthusiasm that decided the nominee; it was the sober, insider competence it had supposedly displaced.

This has been evident for a while, although it took Santorum's departure to drive the point home. As a consequence, tea-party influence is waning. The Democrats' recent success in extending the payroll tax deduction without making offsetting cuts is one example. The House Republicans' new budget, not nearly so radical as last year's, is another. So is that budget's attempt to quietly undo some of the cuts in last summer's deficit bill, a maneuver that might not have stood a chance a year ago.

Still, such backsliding has been limited, and Republicans are oriented almost exclusively toward spending cuts. What now seems clear is that the tea party isn't strong enough or savvy enough to put someone in the White House. But at least for now, it has enough strength to drive the party establishment to the right and prevent the kind of deal-making that was possible in earlier periods of partisan antagonism.

Joshua Green is a national correspondent for Bloomberg Businessweek. This appeared in the Boston Globe.