Is The Tea Party Just a Big Scam?
E. J. Dionne
Is the tea party one of the most successful scams in American political history?
Before you dismiss the question, note that word “successful.” Judge the tea party purely on the grounds of effectiveness and you have to admire how a very small group has shaken American political life and seized the microphone offered by the media, including the so-called liberal media.
But it’s equally important to recognize that the tea party constitutes a sliver of opinion on the extreme end of politics receiving attention out of all proportion with its numbers.
Yes, there is a lot of discontent in America. But that discontent is better represented by the moderate voters who expressed quiet disillusionment to President Obama at the CNBC town hall meeting on Monday than by tea party ideologues who proclaim the unconstitutionality of the New Deal and everything since.
The tea party drowns out such voices because it has money—some of it from un-populist corporate sources, as Jane Mayer documented last month in The New Yorker—and has used modest numbers strategically in small states to magnify its impact.
Just recently, tea party victories in Alaska and Delaware Senate primaries shook the nation. In Delaware, Christine O’Donnell received 30,563 votes in the Republican primary, 3,542 votes more than moderate Rep. Mike Castle. In Alaska, Joe Miller won 55,878 votes for a margin of 2,006 over incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is now running as a write-in candidate.
Do the math. For weeks now, our national political conversation has been driven by 86,441 voters and a margin of 5,548 votes. A bit of perspective: When John McCain lost in 2008, he received 59.9 million votes.
Earlier this year, much was made of the defeat of Sen. Bob Bennett, a Utah conservative insufficiently conservative for the tea party. Bennett lost not in a primary but at a Republican convention attended by all of 3,500 delegates.
Even in larger states, the tea party’s triumphs were built on small shares of the electorate. Rand Paul received 206,986 votes in Kentucky where there are more than 1 million registered Republicans and nearly 2.9 million registered voters. Sharron Angle won with 70,452 votes in Nevada, a state with more than 1 million registered voters.
The media have given substantial coverage to tea party rallies and even small demonstrations. But how many people are actually involved in this movement?
Last April, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 18 percent of Americans identified themselves as supporters of the tea party movement, but slightly less than a fifth of these sympathizers said they had actually attended a tea party rally or meeting. That means just over 3 percent of Americans can be characterized as tea party activists. A more recent poll by Democracy Corps, just before Labor Day, found that 6 percent of voters said they had attended a tea party rally or meeting.
The tea party is not the only small group in history to wield more power than you’d expect from its numbers. In 2008, Barack Obama did very well in party caucuses, which draw many fewer voters than primaries. And it was Lenin who offered the classic definition of a vanguard party as involving “people who make revolutionary activity their profession” in organizations that “must perforce not be very extensive.”
But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History,” observed in an interview that there is a “hall of mirrors” effect created by the rise of “niche” opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives.
There is also the decline of alternative forces in politics. The Republican establishment, such as it is, has long depended far more on big money than on troops in the field. In search of new battalions, GOP leaders stoked the tea party, stood largely mute in the face of its more outrageous untruths about Obama—and now has to defend candidates like O’Donnell and Angle.
And where are the progressives? Sulking is not an alternative to organizing, and weary resignation is the first step toward capitulation. The tea party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media. But if it has more audacity than everyone else, it will, I am sorry to say, deserve to get away with it.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. is is a Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and a professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of, most recently, Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. Original Post: The New Republic, September 23, 2010.
Obama To GOP: It’s Over
Obama listened politely for six hours, with occasional flashes of temper, but in the end, the message was clear: It’s over. We’re moving forward without Republicans.
Whether Obama and Dems will succeed in passing reform on their own is anything but assured, to put it mildly. But there’s virtually no doubt anymore that they are going to try — starting as early as tomorrow.
That was the subtle but unmistakable message of Obama’s closing argument. After hours of hearing Republicans repeat again and again that only an incremental approach to reform is acceptable to them, Obama rejected that out of hand.
Here’s the key bit from Obama:
I’d like Republicans to do a little soul searching to find out if there are some things that you’d be willling to embrace that get to this core problem of 30 million people without health insurance, and dealing seriously with the pre-existing conditions issue. I don’t know frankly whether we can close that gap.
And if we can’t close that gap, then I suspect Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner are going to have a lot of arguments about procedures in Congress about moving forward.
Unless I’m misreading that, Obama is saying that unless Republicans support comprehensive reform as Obama and Dems have defined it — dealing with the problem of 30 million uninsured and, by extension, seriously tackling the preexisting condition problem — they will almost certainly move forward with reconciliation.
What’s more, Obama also essentially accused Republicans of approaching today’s summit in bad faith — after they had sat there with him for six hours. He said that even after the public option was taken off the table, Republicans continued to use the same “government takeover” slur.
“Even after the public option wasn’t available, we still hear the same rhetoric,” Obama said. “We have a concept of an exchange which previously has been an idea that was embraced by Republicans before I embraced it. Somehow, suddenly it became less of a good idea.”
This accusation, combined with his assertion that Repubicans need to do some “soul-searching” on whether they wanted to join Dems in tackling reform as they have defined it, amount to an unmistakable vow to move foward without them.
Democratic aides are already interpreting Obama’s remarks along these lines. As one senior aide emailed: “We may make one last effort to try to get a Senate Republican.”
In terms of who “won” today’s debate, I tend to think Republicans actually accomplished much of what they needed to do today. It seems likely that some Congressional Dems will be just as skittish tomorrow as they were yesterday about moving forward alone via reconciliation. That means Dems still have an enormously difficult task ahead.
But Obama’s message to Dems and Republicans alike today was that barring some kind of major change on the GOP side, this is exactly what he and Dem leaders are about to attempt.
Update: To clarify, this was a call to Dems, perhaps more than anyone else, that the time has come for them to stiffen their spines and move forward with reconciliation, which Republicans, and even some nonpartisan observers, have repeatedly characterized as akin to marching off a cliff.
Also: This summit was always about laying the groundwork for Dems to go forward alone, barring a major capitulation from Republicans. As noted here repeatedly, Dems will find themselves in exactly the same position tomorrow as they did yesterday: Confronting the enormously difficult task of passing ambitious reform on their own.
Update II: A GOP aide emails the Republican take: “They badly needed a win today and they didn’t get it. Not even close. Republicans were prepared. The President was pedantic and peeved.”
Greg Sargent-The Plum Line Feb 25, 2010
Contrary to Greg’s take on who won today, my take is that the American people won. Delay, deny and obstruct was on full display by the GOP today. That was transparency that even Stevie Wonder could see!
Raemd95
“NO” IS NOT A PROCESS
“NO” IS NOT A PROCESS
The dust has yet to settle from last weeks debacle in the Massachusetts Senate election. I have been listening to the pundits who have incessantly harped on and dissected what they thought the election of Scott Brown actually meant for the rest of the country, and for Democrats in particular. The clamoring and jaw-jerking by these same pundits was relentless. They were way too eager, often tripping over themselves to get air time to declare an apocalypse for the Obama administration. Their summations declared Brown’s win as a complete repudiation of the administrations policies and thus, the direction in which these policies were leading the country. Others thought that Brown’s verbal opposition to the current national health reform legislation was the most important factor that led to his upset victory. To be fair, this last interpretation does carry with it a partial truth.
Just for the record, an exit poll conducted by a GOP pollster, Tony Fabrizio, showed that only 38% of the eight hundred participants said they were motivated by opposition to the President’s policies. On the other hand, 32% indicated that they were motivated by support for his policies and 27% indicated that Obama’s policies were not a factor in their voting at all. This means that 59% of the voters polled were either for or indifferent to the President’s policies when they cast their ballot. Furthermore, 53% of independents either supported or were indifferent to the President’s policies.
My take on the results of this Massachusetts election is that a message was indeed sent on that Tuesday night. All of the pundits seem to think that this message is targeted only towards Democrats That message is that people are frustrated, infuriated and exasperated. Why? Because Congress is Not doing its job, plain and simple. A recent CBS poll shows that the approval rating for Congress currently stands at 23% while that for the President remains at 55%. Neither of these numbers however should make anyone comfortable. As such, I believe that Republicans should be just as concerned about November as the Democrats. There is a whole lot of frustration out there and it is highly probable that it will be an equal opportunity un-employer come November.
Reforming health care goes hand in hand with getting the economy back on track. I would like to think of Congress as an institution that is honorable and works for the good of all the people. There is absolutely no reason why health reform should not have been passed to date. There have been all kinds of excuses, lies, obstructions and mis-representations at every turn of the process during this last year.
On the one hand, every Democrat wants to have everything under the sun incorporated into the final bill that the President will eventually sign. This includes the progressive members of the party who often do not or will not see from side to side because of blinders that only allow them to see the tip of their noses. Pay attention progressives….you cannot and will not get everything incorporated into a single package by days end! There will be no “all encompassing” health reform product…this is a project that will have to be massaged for many years to come. This project requires negotiation and cooperation. If you let this opportunity slip away, there will be no second chances. Reasonable people do not use an axe to remove a fly from their forehead. Do not become an instrument for those who say “NO”.
On the other hand, there are my Republican friends who want to say “NO” to anything and everything. First we have those who are livid about the “costs” of any reform package, never mind that this was never a consideration during the previous administration. If it had been, we wouldn’t be in the current mess we are in today. Remember the prescription drug program? If for some reason health reform is not passed this time around and you are worried about what it costs now, what do you think the costs will be when it finally gets back on the radar screen down the road…. and I’m talking somewhere around 2059.
Then there are those who are baffled and dismayed by how the Democrats handled the “process”. They rise to their pontifical perches to berate the Democrats for excluding them from the discussions and debates. They tell anyone who will listen that they have been shut out of the process and that there has been no transparency in any of the multiple committees, no bipartisanship, no good faith, none whatsoever. They were not allowed to offer any amendments to any of the bills at any stage of the “process” and that they were placed under unreasonable “time lines” for completion of a final bill.
As far as I have been able to ascertain, Republicans should be the last to complain about process, bipartisanship, transparency, and good faith. I did a little checking on Republican participation in the various committees leading up to the final passage of the Senate and House health reform bills. On the Senate side, the HELP committee adopted 159 amendments offered by Republicans. On the House side, 16 Republican amendments were adopted during procedures of the Energy and Commerce Committee. In the Education and Labor Committee, 6 of the 17 Republican amendments were adopted by the committee. Finally in the Ways and Means Committee markup, 38 of the Republican sponsored amendments were rejected by the committee.
I think that it is worth noting that during the 111th Congress, Republicans have attempted to filibuster a minimum of 30 times. This has been a part of the “strategy”, a strategy straight from the “obstructionist playbook” offered to Republican colleagues by Sen Judd Gregg in a memo on parliamentary strategy that republicans could use to offer amendments and extend debate on particular resolutions. In efforts to thwart the process, Republicans often offered “technical amendments”, knowing firsthand that they were not significant or relevant to the issues at hand. They were offered only for “strategic” purposes. As expected, these nuisance and frivolous amendments were rejected. Yet these same senators want us to think that they were victimized and that the “process” wasn’t fair or bipartisan….that these amendments were being offered in good faith. Give me a fricking break! By design, you corrupted the process and got what you wanted…an opportunity to cry foul and afford yourselves with another easy distraction to take the focus away from the issues.
It seems to me that the Republican idea of bipartisanship is absolute concession to their ideology, no more, no less. Everything outside the reaches of this ideology falls into the category of “no”. There is no real intention to participate, only to be in a position to say no after no after no. If you continue to chose this route, I remind you that “NO” is not a process. There are consequences for “no”.
With the prevailing winds now blowing within the Washington beltway, it is no wonder that there is so much frustration outside the beltway. Congress, do your job! If you continue your childish games, come November, there will be many “Scott Brown’s” on both sides of the aisle.
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