Many of the stories from Searchlight are a tempest in a teapot

By Jon Ralston

Wednesday, March 31, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

Before the “Showdown in Searchlight” fades into history, with the rapturous crowd dispersed and the Alaskan Athena off to spread her message of love elsewhere, some seminal questions remain unanswered:

Where was the rage and racism?

Who threw the eggs at the Tea Party Express bus?

Were most of the Tea Party activists from outside Nevada?

Oh, the mind does boggle at the inanities emanating from both sides in the wake of the events on the sprawling, wind-chilled expanse of land north of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hometown.

What’s sillier — the attempt by the Tea Party folks to assert the crowd could have been as high as 30,000 or the Reid folks claiming their unscientific survey of cars proves almost all of the attendees were non-Nevadans?

What’s more ludicrous — the focus on who threw eggs at a Tea Party bus or the other side thinking a video of Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver going up the Capitol steps proves he was the victim of a vicious spit attack by a protester (it is not conclusive)?

And what is crazier — that the Tea Party activists claim they are representative of America or that the Democrats are so dismissive of them as a political force?

Before I move on to some important questions about the Tea Party movement and the implications for Campaign ’10, some quick facts:

The police estimated the crowd at 8,000 — maybe it was slightly smaller, perhaps larger because so many people were streaming in late. Even if many were from California, does anyone think Nevada Tea Partyers are not going to make up a potentially decisive portion of the November electorate?

The egg-throwing incident is asinine — a juvenile act by some Reid supporters. Let’s stipulate to that — doesn’t take Holmesian capabilities to deduce such.

So what? So idiots exist on the left, too? Who knew?

Denial by the Democrats that they have thugs — or even socialists! — among them is as fruitless as Republicans pretending racists and birthers are not tea drinkers. We used to know where these people congregated — the party’s central committees — but now they are out and among us.

So that brings us not to what the “Showdown in Searchlight” meant — more peaceful than most dusty showdowns, as the Clantons might attest — but what it means during the next seven months.

I acknowledge that as part of Sarah Palin’s “lamestream” media, I was a little apprehensive about venturing into the Tea Party, fearing the result of packing a supposedly angry mob into that small area. But amid all the name-calling freaks (do these people even know what socialism is?) and prototypical angry white males were a bunch of salt-of-the-earth types who, while they may have an inchoate understanding of why, are mad as hell and clearly won’t take it anymore.

Here’s the bad news for Democrats: The wild-eyed crazy part of the movement is there, but many of these folks — take the earnest Renoite Debbie Landis who helped organize the event — want nothing to do with them. Many may be ignorant, but most don’t seem violent.

The atmosphere was more akin to a rock concert than a political rally — an outdoor event where the opening acts (local candidates) were so bad you craved the headliner and then when she came on, the sound system prevented her from being fully understood. (Does anyone really understand Sarah Palin, though?)

It was like seeing Bob Dylan now — you know the songs by the music, so you know what he is saying, but he remains unintelligible. Similarly, most of the folks there might have heard only a muffled version of Palin, but they got the message — fire all the Democrats, especially that Cerberus guarding the gates of D.C. hell, aka Obama-Pelosi-Reid.

A recent Quinnipiac poll found only 13 percent of Americans consider themselves part of the Tea Party movement. That number may be small in the large picture, but it is large in the smaller picture — i.e., primaries and then general elections. And it may grow as all manner of demagogues try to fuel the fire.

The perception is reality: The spectacle of presumably moderate Republican candidates — Sue Lowden for Senate, Brian Sandoval for governor — making Faustian bargains with the Tea Party is no more harrowing to watch than Democratic hopefuls in the past genuflecting to the AFL-CIO and treating card check as if it were what the Founding Fathers meant by secret ballot.

The “Showdown in Searchlight” is over and will be forgotten. But the real showdown is coming in November, when the movement’s potency will be judged and when candidates will either sip the Kool-Aid-flavored tea or spit it out, preferably not in anyone’s face.