What did tea partiers accomplish in NY-23?

That’s the topic of my column this week with Ben Boychuk. To recap: “tea party” conservatives in that New York congressional district managed to drive a moderate Republican out of the race — and ended up handing the seat to a Democrat in a district that has long sent the GOP to congress. As I write in the column, we’ve seen this story before:

For a good idea of what tea party activism might accomplish, take a good look at Kansas.

It’s about as Republican a state as they come. It last went for a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964. And the GOP has 300,000 more registered voters than its Democratic rivals. But the state’s governor is a Democrat. So is the attorney general.

How in the heck did that happen? Easy. The Republican Party in Kansas tore itself in two, between center-right “moderates” and conservative true believers. The infighting has been going on for more than a decade, leaving voters alienated and giving Democrats opportunities for electoral wins in a state they have no business contesting.

That looks similar to events in New York. The district there had sent moderate Republicans to Congress forever — its last congressman, John McHugh , crossed party lines to work as President Obama’s Secretary of the Army. But when the GOP establishment picked a similarly centrist Republican to run for office, the tea party folks rebelled and backed a different candidate. Who lost.

The tea party movement started as the biggest expression of sore loserdom in America’s recent political history. George W. Bush had expanded “socialized medicine” — in the form of the new Medicare drug benefit — and turned a budget surplus into a deep deficit. Yet the tea partiers only took to the streets when a Democrat was elected president. It’s not difficult to figure out what motivated them.

So the fact that tea partiers are now holding Republicans to account is refreshing. But parties that insist on ideological purity are usually losers at the ballot box; Democrats began their recent comeback when centrists like Sens. Jim Webb and Bob Casey joined their cause. Tea partiers should heed the lesson if they want to win.

These are tea partiers I can believe in

I think I’ve mentioned several times my belief that tea partiers are the biggest sore losers in modern American political history — because if they really were so concerned about Big Government and deficit spending, they’d have spent the last eight years in the streets. The fact that they suddenly became concerned enough to protest, I thought, made them little more than shills for the GOP.

Color me corrected:

Whether it’s the loose confederation of Washington-oriented groups that have played an organizational role or the state-level activists who are channeling grass-roots anger into action back home, tea party forces are confronting the Republican establishment by backing insurgent conservatives and generating their own candidates — even if it means taking on GOP incumbents.

“We will be a headache for anyone who believes the Constitution of the United States … isn’t to be protected,” said Dick Armey, chairman of the anti-tax and limited government advocacy group FreedomWorks, which helped plan and promote the tea parties, town hall protests and the September ‘Taxpayer March’ in Washington. “If you can’t take it seriously, we will look for places of other employment for you.”

At first blush, this just looks like a new variation on the “Club for Growth” types like Pat Toomey who have chased moderates like Arlen Specter out of the Republican Party. These guys aren’t my ideological cup of tea. But if they’re willing to hold their own party to fiscal account — instead of becoming deficit hawks only during Democratic administrations — well, more power to them.

This is why it’s hard for me to take the Tea Partiers seriously

If soaring debt driven by massive government spending is really, really your main problem, you should’ve been out in the streets during every Republican Administration of the last 30 years. You weren’t. So I don’t believe you. Sorry.

(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan.)

Tea partiers: Sore losers

It drives my conservative-slash-libertarian friends crazy when I say this, but I’ll say it again: The tea partiers are a bunch of sore losers. Andrew Sullivan makes the case:

Here’s a test: when you see as many posters lambasting Bush and Cheney and the GOP for getting us into this crisis in the first place, I will take these people seriously as genuine small government non-partisan conservatives and independents. In so far as they can pressure the Congress and president into taking the debt seriously in the future, good for them. In so far as they are proposing no practical solutions, and echo truly disturbing hatred of a president barely eight months in office, facing huge crises on all fronts, they are doing their own cause far more harm than good.

Right. I have a great deal of respect for genuine small-government conservatives — even though I think their utopia is unrealistic and (given the actual governance of actual Republicans) unlikely. But the idea that there’s all these people who were always angry about increased spending and increased entitlements under the Bush Administration — but kept silent until Obama pushed them one step too far — strikes me as laughable. There’s some sincere people among the tea partiers, no doubt, but it’s not really a small government movement. It’s an anti-Democratic governance movement. And while it’s certainly their right to be anti-Democratic, nobody should be under the illusion that these people are particularly principled.

Extreme rhetoric attracts extremists

In this week’s print edition of PW, I write about the July 4 tea parties at Independence Hall — and how they took a left turn I’m not sure a whole bunch of people were expecting:

It’s getting so you can’t tell regular Republican insanity from the lunatic fringe anymore. Take July 4, when a parade of local conservative luminaries—  Philadelphia Bulletin  publisher Tom Rice, columnist Herb Denenberg and State Rep. Curt Schroder, among them—gathered with 2,000 people at Independence Hall for a “tea party” devoted to protesting President Obama’s tyrannical, socialist rule of unending taxation.

“My final advice to Obama: Leave it or love it. You seem to hate America,” Denenberg snarled in a YouTube video
 made at the event. “Why don’t you move to Europe where they love you because of your socialist ideas? Why don’t you move to one of the banana republics or Venezuela, or Syria, where you seem to be more in tune with the tyrants and dictators than you seem to be in tune with the people of the United States?”

So it didn’t seem a huge leap when antitax activist Larken Rose took the microphone a couple of hours later, praised America’s Founding Fathers as “cop killers”—and wondered aloud why today’s citizens are too wimpy to follow in their footsteps. (A rough transcript of Rose’s speech is available at his website.)

Now it turns out that Rose wasn’t speaking rhetorically: He really was telling his audience that that it would be virtuous to abandon the Democratic process. And that it really would be virtuous to resist and rebel against a crushingly oppressive federal government. And that this federal government was far more oppressive than the English were when the colonists started shooting at them. The math is easy to figure out.

If you take a look at his website, in fact, it’s clear that Rose doesn’t have any use at all for government. Which, you know, fine: I’ve met and liked some anarchists in my time. But I tend to shy away from people who write things like this about the police accused of civil rights violations:

In closing, I’d like to say the following to Mr. C. Diaz, Mr. B. Griffiths, and Mr. E. Gomez, and any other Nazi swine whoparticipated in the incident described above. If some day you pick
the wrong target for your Gestapo crap, and the guy blows your damn fascist pig heads off, the world will be a better place.

Hey, I’m against civil liberties violations. I really am. But I don’t think Rose has the right solution.

Tracking down how Rose ended up with a microphone on July 4 turned out to be tricky. The Independence Hall Tea Party Association, which sponsored most of the day’s events, said it didn’t have anything to do with him — and I believe them. Pennburg resident Rob Pepe (who seems like a nice guy) helped organize the other events, but told me he didn’t invite Rose. Nobody wants credit, and everybody kind of wants to disassociate themselves from his comments.

I should say here: Rose is no Republican. But he found cover, sanctuary and a literal platform for his message at an event that promoted, aided and abetted by the Republican Party and its associated organs. There’s a context here. Like I say in the print piece:

Attendees of Philly’s tea parties have spent recent months carrying signs accusing President Obama of being a fascist tyrant who’s robbing future American generations of both their money and their freedom—and screaming for the necessity of revolt. That’s the  sane  stuff. Is it any wonder that an extremist like Larken Rose feels at home with the Fox News crowd?

No. Not really.

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism … when Republicans do it

Just when I think I’m out, Jonah Goldberg drags me back in:

It seems to me that one reason the political establishment snickered so much at the tea parties last week was that so many of the events looked amateurish. For instance, the crude handwritten signs carried by the tea partiers were clumsy-looking compared to the professionally printed placards handed out by union organizers and advocacy groups at May Day rallies, antiwar protests, Earth Day confabs and pretty much every other “good” protest of the last 40 years.  As fans of  P.J. O’Rourke have been pointing out, while the left has created a sizable protest-industry over the last half-century or so, conservatives have had these things called “jobs.”

Meanwhile, what we used to call the  “silent majority” of Americans don’t really know how to do people power (personally, it’s one of the things I like about them). With the exception of the occasional pro-life march, the right is generations behind the left on this stuff, which is one reason why they found it necessary to go back to 1773 – the original Boston Tea Party — to find a useful precedent.

Personally, I think it’s telling that Goldberg likes the “silent majority” of Americans because they don’t get all huffy about their rights all that often. But I hadn’t heard anybody decrying the protesters as being particularly “amateurish” — in fact, the only person I’ve seen mention this is … Jonah Goldberg.

I suspect, though, that Goldberg’s defense has something to do with the paradox that Jon Stewart highlighted on The Daily Show last week:

The paradox being, of course, that the same people who five or six years or eight years ago were deriding people who had the temerity to protest the, uh, dubious circumstances under which George W. Bush took office, or to protest the invasion of Iraq, now find themselves defending not just the message, but the very techniques they once derided.

But that can’t be, can it?

So of course folks like Goldberg have to sanctify the methods of protest as somehow being more virtuous when in the hands of the “right people.” That’s silly, of course. A cause is either worthy or it isn’t, but the methods of protest — marching, placard-waving, speech-giving, etc. — are fairly agnostic.

Nice note from a reader who disagrees with me about tea parties

You know what I love? Vigorous-but-civil disagreement about the issues of the day. Which is why I’m a fan of this note I received over the weekend from Greg Thompson in South Carolina:

Hi Joel,

I’m one of the people who attended a tea party (Greenville SC) and we get your column in my local paper. I am writing to dispute your overall assertion that the tea parties were little more than a Fox News/Republican contrivance.  I realize that you did include some less dismissive language but the overall theme of your column seemed to be to minimize the significance of the parties and to deny the sincerity of their outrage.

I can only speak for myself but I am completely outraged at the Democrats AND Republicans.  I am outraged about virtually every issue and every government intrusion under the sun.  I complained about Bush through most of his 8 years and I was displeased with the Republican Congress as well as the current Dem one.  Personally, I think the catalyst for the tea parties was not Obama’s victory (sore loser as you suggested) but the combination of the recession, market crash, housing bailouts, Wall Street bailouts, AIG bonuses, and stimulus plan.  Most of this stuff really festered in the past 3 or 4 months so I don’t find the timing as suspect as you do.  I will concede that you are correct to question Hannity and that he is little more than a Republican hack.

I guess my overall point is that I know there were a lot of people out there like me who were genuinely outraged by the deficits, spending, etc. regardless of who is doing it.  I won’t deny that some of the people out there were out to protest Obama as you contended.  My contention is that unless you ran a poll of the crowd, there’s really no way to know which group was in the majority.  The impression I got though was that these people were very serious about fiscal responsibility.  Some in the crowd even jeered Gov. Mark Sanford for even accepting ANY of the stimulus funds.  Our conservative Repub. congressman (Gresham Barrett) was booed for almost his whole speech. (There is footage of this on Michelle Malkin’s site if you are interested)

Oh well, I just wanted to speak for those of us who are genuinely disturbed about what’s going on.  Please don’t dismiss our message just because there may be some who were there for political reasons.  The problems we were protesting were legitimate and will hurt all of us eventually.

Greg

I really do appreciate Greg’s civility in his note, and given that I opened my part of the column by calling the tea parties a display of “sore loserdom,” that’s probably far more civility than I was actually owed.

There are three legs to my feelings about the tea parties, two of which I’ve explored and one of which I’ve not said much about publicly.

Those three legs:

• RHETORICAL: Sorry, but there was a lot of douchebagginess on display at the tea parties. Lots of it. And I just hate that kind of stuff. I hate it from my side, too: I’ve never run with the Kos crowd or Firedoglake because shrillness seems (to me) to be their stock in trade. I don’t watch Olbermann and can only occasionally watch Rachel Maddow. (Her dialogue with Ana Marie Cox about “teabagging” was painful for me to view.) If I hate that stuff from liberals, you can imagine how I feel about it when it comes from conservatives.

I know. I’m a delicate, wilting flower.

• POLITICAL: That’s mostly what my post-slash-column contribution were about. I get cranky about hypocrisy and I’m not wrong that many of the folks trying to whip up a frenzy right now were pretty quiet about similar sins during the Bush Era.

• POLICY: There were a lot of topics thrown in the pot of the protests, so I’m not going to say the protesters, broadly, have a point. However….

…when it comes to debt: They have a point.

I don’t like that how deeply we’re plunging into the debt hole. I think a short-term case can be made for it, but it appears we’re returning to an era of blithely running deficits, big ones, as the usual course of business. And if the current meltdown is teaching us anything, it’s this: Debt as a way of life is unsustainable. And expecting to grow your way out of debt is a recipe for disaster.

Perhaps I need to be louder about this. (And perhaps it makes my criticism of the tea parties unfair; I don’t think that’s necessarily the case.) I do think I’m on record about being ambivalent, at best, about this stuff. It’s kind of silly to continually shout one’s ambivalence to the heavens, however, which is one reason I refrain. Nobody wants to read the Hamlet shtick.

Of torture and tea parties

This is my last comment on either of these topics for awhile. I swear.

But I do find it ironic that the same week conservatives took to the streets by the thousands to protest the “tyranny” of taxation, we got a deeper look at the inner workings of an administration that secretly reserved to itself the right to break longstanding laws against torture — using methods modeled on those used by dictatorial Communist regimes that conservatives were once, rightly, so loud about opposing — and heard barely a peep of protest from the right.

Draw your own conclusions.

About the tea parties

Sad to say, but the tea parties were one of the biggest displays of sore loserdom seen in recent U.S. history.

Ostensibly the parties protested the massive expansion of government, the accompanying growth of the federal budget and, not least, the use of taxpayer money to bail out private individuals and businesses in danger of financial collapse. These events may well be worthy of protest — and vigorous dissent is a vital, necessary part of the American tradition — but they were happening five months ago. Conservatives were not massing in the streets then, however.

What changed? Easy. George W. Bush left office. And Barack Obama became president. Thus the whiff of sour grapes over the whole affair.

No doubt the demonstrations included many people legitimately concerned about the growth of government, regardless of which party is in power. But the glee of Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and the rest of the Fox News gang in promoting the tea parties suggests those sincere folks were co-opted by Republican operatives less concerned about free market capitalism and more interested in undermining a Democratic president.

This would be merely exasperating if it weren’t for the alarming rhetoric on display. Some demonstrators compared President Obama to Mao Zedong, as though raising marginal tax rates was equivalent to mass murder. Others warned of revolt — Texas Gov. Rick Perry even suggested his state could leave the union — and many carried signs warning of “taxation without representation.” Which is ridiculous: Whether you love or hate the new policies in Washington D.C., they are being crafted and carried out by duly elected representatives of the people.

Lovers of small government probably should protest President Obama. They should’ve done it under President Bush, too. That they waited tells you what the protests were really about.