Well, avoiding all the conspiracy theories and prejudices displayed already....
The tea party movement represents many people because it represents some foundational principles that attract each of them for various reasons. I hear a lot of outright slander of the movement in general, and every person I know who has actually attended an event has not seen anything coming close to the nonsense I hear being screamed about by the mainstream press against it.
The movement, in my observation, begins with a demand for government accountability and responsibility.
For some time now, probably 20 years or more, voters have felt that the politicians care nothing about what we want after they get our votes in the election. This angst/dissatisfaction has grown worse every election cycle. Indeed Americans are at the point where they have little to no confidence in the politicians in office or the electoral process as a whole.
Now, we had 9/11, and many can debate the necessity of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the war spending, but it is clear that government seems to not see a spending program they don't like. Republicans claim to hold to conservative values and are the party of personal responsibility. With G.W. Bush and the Republicans running the Congress, we had government expansion and spending that made the Democrats look like penny-pinching old men. Republicans were given near-total control of DC and they botched things really bad.
More so, the effort to EDUCATE the average American of how bad a condition our economy actually is in (in spite of outward appearances) and how unsound our monetary policy is has started to bear fruit. More and more Americans are now keenly aware of how unsustainable government has become and how bad of a economic train wreck is coming. The outrage at all the self-serving government programs created by politicians for their special interests at the expense of our current hopes for prosperity and the prosperity for our children and grandchildren has reached a breaking point.
Now, in 2008, Obama becomes president on the platform of "hope and change." For anyone who knows politics and politicians, there was nothing credible about his claims, nor did he have a real action plan to turn around what America was doing wrong. Before he won the election, government was pushing the TARP bailouts of Wall Street....something the pubic was massively opposed to. If any of us are fiscally irresponsible, we go bankrupt. We loose our home. We loose our car. We eat 99 cent generic mac and cheese because it's all we can afford, but let Wall Street act badly and the taxpayers get stuck with the bill. The best way to let the free market fix itself is to let bad actors reap what they sow. Not here, and that was the trigger point. Congress passed something we didn't want them to, giving preferred treatment to a whole class of free market actors over others.
Then, Obama gets into office. What does he choose to do? Change how government operates? No. We then see the bailout of 2 out of 3 grossly mis-managed US automakers...again with taxpayer money. Only if those two failing companies (which have not changed their business leadership or business model) were to become astoundingly successful would the taxpayer see anything good come of the bailouts.
Next comes Obamacare. The "heath care reform" we desperately need REQUIRES that every party that contributes to the health care issue be put together to fix what is broken and keep what works. Did Obama or his Democrats in Congress do that? No. They passed a monstrosity of legislation that even Pelosi admitted publicly to having never read. "We have to pass it before we can know what's in it" is tantamount to treason. It is their job to know all the intimate details of a bill before they vote to make it a law. Even then, it's now come out that the budget numbers on what Obamacare will cost and it's economic impact were fudged while selling the idea to the American people (not that it helped, we were jaded enough to not buy it), and even the watchdog groups couldn't get a full copy of the bill (which was passed) for analysis until after it was made law.
Government as usual, billions if not trillions of debt for programs we can't afford. Reform that really makes things worse overall, mostly because laws are written by special interests to serve themselves and not the people it's supposed to help.
When you realize the last thing our nation can afford is more spending when we have to beg China to buy our T-bills so our dollar won't implode next year, no matter how well-intentioned, more programs and more spending is the LAST THING we want or need.
We want government responsibility and accountability, and yet again, we do not have it.
That is why the movement has gained so much steam in the last two-years.
Yes, the Republicans are capitalizing on the movement right now....chiefly because we are still entrenched in a two-party system (that needs to change), but even the conservative (albeit Republican) pundits are noting that if the American people give Republicans the Congress in 2010 and they DO NOT work to bring government back to something sane (regardless of how well Obama helps/obstructs the effort), where do we go from there? Will a new 3rd party emerge that people will go with?
Sadly, to change Congress, it is imperative to have the public outrage to vote out incumbents for at least 6 years straight (3 election cycles...generally). Only if you reduce Congress so that nobody has that much seniority can you get out the old guard that got us into this mess and put in people who have chance of doing what they promised to do when elected.
02 Nov 2010, 12:32 am
