By Noemie Emery
To hear the media tell it the Tea Party movement is one of the most mysterious forces ever to surface in national life. Since February 2009 when CNBCs Rick Santelli urged his listeners to dump unfunded derivatives into Lake Michigan to protest the developing culture of bailouts they have been nothing but open about their fears of insolvency their discomfort with increasing size of the government and their terror of deficits.
The media listen closely to all these objections and decide they must mean something else.
They say they fear debt and the media insist that they must fear Hispanics (why they hate Marco Rubio) that they fear blacks (why they hate Thomas Sowell) that they fear strong women (why they want Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin to be sent back to the kitchen in chains).
Much as the Republican win in the 1994 midterms was dismissed as a tantrum by the late Peter Jennings Tea Partiers are described as being driven by inchoate anger but the spin on their nature has tended to change.
First they were described as an ignorant rabble much as the Washington Post had once pegged evangelicals. Then polls showed that they were a rabble that was better off and better informed than the public in general and they became a selfish and privileged rabble: a privileged rabble parading as populists.
- An aggrieved elite Dana Milbank sniffed.
- Race is part of the picture E.J. Dionne noted.
- The Tea Partiers arent standing up for the little guy; theyre standing up TO the little guy Peter Beinart complained.
- The Tea Partiers favor the economically and racially privileged ... What the Tea Partiers dislike about Barack Obamas economic policies is that they dont do enough for the rich.
What Tea Partiers dislike about Obamas policies is that theyve tripled the national debt.
Something unique happened in Obamas first year Daniel Henninger wrote. The veil was ripped from the true cost of government. This is a ghastly nightmare the Democrats have needed to keep locked in a crypt.
Obama began with a $787 billion stimulus package (which most economists have now dismissed as a failure) passed a fiscal 2010
budget of $3.5 trillion passed a fiscal 2011 budget of $3.8 trillion and passed his health care reform bill for additional trillions whose scope we dont know.
Henninger pegs this years spending at $9 trillion.
The Tea Party is a popular not a populist movement a grass-roots uprising against the cost and expansion of government power. It fears that the debt has become unsustainable.
Do not expect Dionne or Beinart to recognize this.
Dont expect from New York magazines John Heilemann either who told a panel on Chris Matthews program that the protesters motives were all Greek to him.
- What is the focus what is the cause of this? You think back to 1994 there was Ruby Ridge. There was Waco. There were triggering incidents. Theres been nothing like that. The only thing thats changed in the past 15 months is the election of Barack Obama. As far as I can see in terms of the policies that Obama has implemented theres nothing he said.
Under the heading of nothing would be debt in the trillions Greece going bankrupt California tanking under the weight of public service unions and their extravagant benefits other states foundering and massive entitlements being added on in the midst of a recession.
Other than that of course theres nothing to see here.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Noemie Emery is contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and author of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.
budget of $3.5 trillion passed a fiscal 2011 budget of $3.8 trillion and passed his health care reform bill for additional trillions whose scope we dont know.
Henninger pegs this years spending at $9 trillion.
The Tea Party is a popular not a populist movement a grass-roots uprising against the cost and expansion of government power. It fears that the debt has become unsustainable.
Do not expect Dionne or Beinart to recognize this.
Dont expect from New York magazines John Heilemann either who told a panel on Chris Matthews program that the protesters motives were all Greek to him.
Noemie Emery is contributing editor to the Weekly Standard and author of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.
