Classic Liberal Blog

As the next round of elections draw near, beware of Establishment wolves in sheep's clothing.

Mitt warns against “Independent” Thinking

Good ole Mitt “has urged the Tea Party leaders not to be quite so independent minded”, cautioning them not to mount direct electoral challenges outside the GOP establishment. I guess Romney will be running for President on the Anti-Change platform, against Obama’s “Really, I mean it this time Change” platform. Decisions, decisions.

For a proper understanding of Mitt RomneyCare's "warning," please read "A Choice Not An Echo."

‘Money, Money, Money’

One man who doesn’t want to see that happen is Doug Hoffman, the “Ordinary American” candidate whose third-party campaign last year in New York’s 23rd District became a national crusade for conservatives fed up with Washington, including the Beltway GOP. “The legacy of my [2009] campaign is that many Americans who had never been involved before saw that they could get involved and make a difference,” Hoffman told me in a telephone interview last week, after announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination in this year’s mid-term election.

Strange as it may seem, some Republicans still haven’t gotten the message. There are rumors in New York that the national GOP establishment is trying to recruit Will Barclay to run against Hoffman. Scion of a wealthy family, Barclay is a state assemblyman whose father was appointed ambassador to El Salvador by President Bush. The chief argument for the younger Barclay’s candidacy, as one Hoffman-supporting conservative told me last week, can be summarized in three words: “Money, money, money.”

Can such an argument prevail in a year when Republicans hope to capture the populist energy of the Tea Party movement? ... It would also send a message to the party's conservative rank-and-file that their loyalty to Republicans is strictly a one-way street, never to be respected in any instance where grassroots preferences conflict with the political ambitions of party insiders.

Tea party brings energy, change and tumult to GOP

The political commentariat doesn't know what to make of those thousands of Americans who have spontaneously thronged to tea parties and town hall meetings to oppose the big government programs of the Obama administration and Democratic congressional leaders.

In terms of their immediate effect on conventional politics and their potential for continued influence, I think the tea partiers bear an uncanny resemblance to the antiwar activists in the Vietnam War period.

But if they stay involved, the tea partiers are likely to gravitate to the Republican Party, just as the antiwar folk gravitated to the Democratic Party, on which they had a long-lasting and pervasive effect.

Tea partiers have caused some internal party splits (see the New York District 23 special election) and some may launch primary challenges or third-party efforts that will elect Democrats. Any time a large number of motivated people inject themselves into electoral politics, they cause a certain amount of chaos.

They also add a lot of energy, political creativity and enthusiasm into a moribund and dejected political party, like the Democrats of 1968 and the Republicans of 2008. New people change the positions and focus of their parties.

It's not clear whether the tea partiers' influence on Republicans will last as long as the antiwar cohort's imprint on Democrats. But their concern -- the fact that government spending is on a trajectory to increase far beyond revenues -- seems likely to persist. In which case a spontaneous movement that no one predicted and that no one person led could end up, again, reshaping one of our great political parties.

The Real Tea Party Story: Community Builders vs. Community Organizers

In less than a year, the MSM has gone from ignoring Tea Parties to mocking and insulting their participants to grudging coverage with ridiculing overtones. Finally it has arrived at giving wide attention to the movement, albeit grudgingly and ungraciously. A once-highly esteemed fourth estate, they have become talking-head dilettantes on a mission to save the disgruntled masses from democracy itself.

David Brooks, token toy conservative at the NYT, wrote his explanation for the Tea Parties without ever mentioning them by name, even. He wrote a whole diatribe on the meaning of it all. It's a knee-jerk reaction by us commoners, you see, against the "educated class." It has nothing to do with real issues, don't you know. This whole wave of discontent is simply a revolt by the common man against his intellectual betters.
What a bunch of myopic poppycock.

The real Tea Party story is quite simple and an eloquent tribute to democracy: a genuine movement of ordinary people rising to the demands of their all-American principles. It represents a fundamental difference between those who seek to provide for themselves and those who see government as provider of all material goods. The Tea Party movement is a valiant resistance to decades of profligate entitlement spending, which has had the real effect of worsening every problem it was intended to fix, landing the country, at last, in a sea of impossible debt. Tea Partiers, like the Liberty Boys of 1776, stand steadfast on the principle of equality in the rule of law, not government-ordered equality in material-world goods.

Basically, the resistance boils down to a contest between community builders and community organizers.

My 2 cents ... The Republican Party is at best, a tool to be used by the Tea Parties ... but it will never be the answer. Liberty is our goal!