If you added up all the words in the MSM about the Tea Party phenomenon, the snark would outweigh the insights by a 2-1 or maybe 3-1 ratio. The Tea Party is not some right wing extreme within the Republican party, rather it is an intelligent, if populist, and almost predictable reaction to the failure of the 2-party duopoly to restrain both the growth of big government and the yawning deficit. Unfortunately, the media paradigm is stuck with a binary view of politics in America: Democrat/humanitarian/labor/biggovernment versus Republican/militant/corporate/antitax. It's a false frame, and the Republican party has been especially hypocritical in the last half century.
Look, this quasi-movement could easily start morphing into a third party... "The notion that the Tea Party movement is a vocal minority in the Republican Party may have been put to rest today. A new three-way generic ballot from Rasmussen Reports finds that a Tea Party candidate would fare better than a Republican candidate, 23% to 18%, with the Democratic candidate coming out on top at 36%. The poll also found 22% remained undecided." Wow.
As Rick Santelli, who may have inspired the tea partiers with a famous March 2009 rant said to Chris Matthews, "This isn't a left and right issue." (Seen here in this link to a good Megan McCarlde blog post).
I just wonder why it's so easy for my highly educated friends to dismiss the tea partiers, as if they were rabid. The Rasmussen survey confirms the hunger for a huge swath of Americans - the same kind of folks who backed Ross Perot in 1992 - to return to the limited federal role enshrined in the Constitution. They have been bubbling under the surface because the political system has effectively kept them locked out.
"Debt is the salve on the wound of rancorous politics. It fixes everything! Until the bill comes due" says WaPo's Joel Achenbach in another mini-masterpiece. Well, not quite. Debt is the result of a broken political process, not a salve or side-effect of a functional process. And deficits will not be fixed without a better politics -- less gerrymandering, fewer election laws that favor incumbents and incumbent parties, and zero restrictions on free speech. Bets on that kind of reform happening?
Every two years we get candidates who promise to change the ways of Washington, to forge a bipartisan consensus. The result? Highly evolved creatures that speak glowing centrist rhetoric and produce hyper-partisan legislation the spends more and taxes less. And it is getting worse.
If you want to understand the anger about "re-using TARP money" to pay for a new job stimulus, just remember this: Americans were promised the $700 billion in TARP funds would be repaid in full. This was investment, not spending. And now?
If they try and make the know nothing Sara Palin their poster girl . I believe I am going to have to pass . Ron Paul Yes , Palin never .
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