The Seduction of the Tea Partiers
By ROSS DOUTHAT
NYT
On the surface, the Pledge to America that House Republicans unveiled last week, in obvious imitation of Newt Gingrich’s famous Contract With America, feels like a triumph for the Tea Party.
Whereas the Gingrich-era contract was a terse, 865-word list of legislative priorities, the 2010 pledge reads like an expansive, even radical manifesto. It runs to almost 8,000 words, bristles with charts and graphs and inspiring quotations, and includes a lengthy preamble modeled on the Declaration of Independence. And whereas the original contract’s language was carefully poll-tested to appeal to squishy moderates, the pledge has the aggressively small-government tone of a Rand Paul stump speech, complete with attacks on “self-appointed elites,” praise for Americans’ speaking out “in town halls and on public squares,” and pledges “to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers.”
But style can be deceiving. House Republicans have adopted the atmospherics of the Tea Party movement, but they’ve evaded its most admirable substance.
The Tea Party is a grass-roots movement — wild, woolly and chaotic — which sometimes makes it hard to figure out exactly what it stands for. But to the extent that the movement boasts a single animating idea, it’s the conviction that the Republicans as much as the Democrats have been an accessory to the growth of spending and deficits, and that the Republican establishment needs to be punished for straying from fiscal rectitude.
(More here.)
NYT
On the surface, the Pledge to America that House Republicans unveiled last week, in obvious imitation of Newt Gingrich’s famous Contract With America, feels like a triumph for the Tea Party.
Whereas the Gingrich-era contract was a terse, 865-word list of legislative priorities, the 2010 pledge reads like an expansive, even radical manifesto. It runs to almost 8,000 words, bristles with charts and graphs and inspiring quotations, and includes a lengthy preamble modeled on the Declaration of Independence. And whereas the original contract’s language was carefully poll-tested to appeal to squishy moderates, the pledge has the aggressively small-government tone of a Rand Paul stump speech, complete with attacks on “self-appointed elites,” praise for Americans’ speaking out “in town halls and on public squares,” and pledges “to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers.”
But style can be deceiving. House Republicans have adopted the atmospherics of the Tea Party movement, but they’ve evaded its most admirable substance.
The Tea Party is a grass-roots movement — wild, woolly and chaotic — which sometimes makes it hard to figure out exactly what it stands for. But to the extent that the movement boasts a single animating idea, it’s the conviction that the Republicans as much as the Democrats have been an accessory to the growth of spending and deficits, and that the Republican establishment needs to be punished for straying from fiscal rectitude.
(More here.)
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1 Comments:
The Tea Party movement is many things to many people. To those in power, it is a threat. To those who believe in the hard core Marxist principles being espoused by this administration, it is a threat! For those who believe our country needs to subvert itself to the whims of Islamic Fanatics, or Euro Socialism or whatever else, it is a threat!
As such, there are way too many people who do not remotely understand what is happening here. Our fighting men and women, our forefathers who gave their blood and lives for this country, they understand! Unfortunately, the folks that have either had everything handed to them or instead have chosen to ride on the back of others instead of being responsible for themselves combined with the elected morons who realize keeping people reliant on government insures their power, they do not understand!
The Tea Party movement is not a fight for the heart and soul of the Republican party! A co-opted media led by a hard core left wing wanna be dictatorship government would want you to believe that it is in fact all about the Republicans. And they would be dead wrong! The Tea Party movement is a fight for the heart and soul of our country! It is a fight to return us to what made us the greatest country in the world! How sad that entrenched politicians on the right along with the garbage on the left cannot or refuse to understand such a basic tenet!
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