The election of Barack Obama was supposed to change everything — but sometimes it seems as though the more things change, the more they stay the same. With Obama as with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, these days it seems as though the voters do sometimes want an alteration in power — but as soon as they install a Democrat in the White House, the President is under siege, with conservatives at his throat. What is going on nationally perhaps can be well illustrated by using Texas as a laboratory — given that recently I got some insight on political happenings within the Lone Star State by means of a conversation with a well-placed source.

Looming over national politics, as well as the politics of most states, is the “tea party” movement, with Sarah Palin as its putative leader (my source regards her as the front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination). It is well and truly worth pondering how it came to pass that not only affluent voters, but those of low to moderate incomes, came to see this no-government tendency as their champion. Pundits are in a quandary over whether to interpret the “tea party” uprising as an independent movement — a potential third party — or simply a tendency within the Republican Party.

My source inclines to the latter view. He looks at the “tea partiers” as a Republican phenomenon — but an expression of the “base,” of political amateurs rather than party insiders and professionals. Almost by definition, then, no prominent Republican politician or officeholder can be regarded as a bona fide representative of the movement. All over the landscape, officeholders at all levels who had expected a routine reelection campaign are scurrying to stave off a “tea party”-based challenge. The prospects for such a challenge largely are unpredictable, because the “tea party” movement has attracted disaffected individuals who have not participated in the political system previously. That such individuals would gravitate to an ideologically right-of-center tendency confirms, I suppose, the description of the contemporary United States as an incorrigibly “center-right” country, as so many right-of-center pundits insist.

In the race for the Texas governorship, the conventional wisdom for some months has been that the race practically boils down to the Republican primary battle between incumbent Rick Perry and U. S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. They say that in a general election you have to move toward the middle of the road, whereas in a primary you have to appeal to your party’s base — by moving to the right or to the left, depending on the party. That certainly is the case in the Republican primary campaign, as even a casual perusal of the political advertising reveals that the two contenders are trying to “out-conservative” each other. That puts Sen. Hutchison at a distinct disadvantage — in part perhaps because she is female; voters suspect that there may be a bit of Susan Collins or Olympia Snowe in her. Furthermore, she is not given to making offhand statements about the possibility of the Lone Star State seceding from the union. She has also been harmed by having wavered about whether to resign from her seat in the Senate. She has, however, found one issue on which she may be able to “out-conservative” her opponent — the matter of the so-called Trans-Texas Corridor. You might have thought that the notion of an upgrade in the state’s infrastructure would appeal to practical-minded Texans — but the whole thing has come to be seen as both a land grab and a power grab, and a provocation to Texans who tend to be militant in defense of their property rights. In and around Austin, voters were left with a bad taste in their mouths when a new system of freeways on the city’s outskirts was converted to toll roads at the last minute. Voters thought they had already paid for the highways with their taxes. It’s just more grist for the “tea party” mill — which is testified to by the fact that Debra Medina, a former GOP county chair who is associated with Ron Paul’s Campaign for Liberty organization, had to be included in the Texas gubernatorial debate at the last minute. (The debate is being broadcast statewide Thursday evening, as this post is being written.)

Speculation has been rife in the national media that Texas may be changing politically. Indeed, there are two well-funded Democratic gubernatorial candidates, so that the party’s nomination may not be quite as worthless as it would have been thought to have been a decade ago. The state is undergoing demographic changes, although voters of Hispanic descent have not yet been active in proportion to their numbers. The election of an uncloseted lesbian as mayor of Houston dramatized a trend toward the Democrats in the state’s central cities, if not in the state as a whole.

Supposedly, that trend in Texas was reflective of a nationwide trend that culminated in the election of Barack Obama. Why, then, a year later, is everyone quaking in their boots out of fear of the “tea partiers”? Your humble servant has lived through more than 40 years of backlash — and he is not convinced that this backlash has completely played itself out. I am afraid that the characteristics of this country are such that politics at the grassroots will never be “progressive” — at least as long as the most prominent standardbearers of progressivism are degreed professionals in the public sector. For some time to come, the predominant political expression of white voters — who still make up 70% of the country — will be right-of-center, not just for affluent whites, but those of moderate or even low incomes as well. Stay tuned….