Dump the Party -- Keep the Tea

It’s way too easy to make fun of the Tea Party. Clownish Tea party-backed candidates for public office, such as Sharron Angle in Nevada and Delaware’s Christine O’Donnell invite caricature and parody. So does the stereotype of the Tea Party rank and file – a virtually all-white, over-50 crowd, donning baseball caps. They’re easy prey.

But, to dismiss the Tea Party movement out of hand, on the assumption that it’s led by a bunch of clowns and based on a platform of unfocused anger that will shortly fizzle out, is fraught with peril — for two reasons. The first, most immediate danger is that regardless of how the movement does long term, it’s highly unlikely it will lose steam before the November election. So, after November, we may well be referring to the objects of our ridicule as Senator Angle and Senator O’Donnell. Secondly, regardless of how the current Tea Party does in November, there is a danger of overlooking the underlying angst, anger, and dissatisfaction, which even centrist Americans are feeling about the direction of the country and who believe they have nowhere to turn except the Tea Party.

On that note, New York Times columnist Tom Friedman makes an important distinction between the current Tea Party faithful getting so much public attention, which he calls the “Tea Kettle Movement” because it just blows off steam, and this other much larger group whose agenda is still largely amorphous and unfocused, but real. They want someone who can summon us to greatness again, claims Friedman, and all they are looking for, he says, is a leader who can tap into that and galvanize their support.

As a strong Obama supporter, I could easily make the case that we already have that type of leader and point to the President’s accomplishments over the past two years. Education reform, increased funding for research and development, including alternative forms of energy, financial regulatory reform, tax cuts for small businesses and the middle class, not to mention health-care reform which is designed to finally enable the U.S. to match what other major industrialized nations have been doing for decades. Currently, in the category of richest nations, the U.S. ranks among the worst providers of health care even though we spend significantly more than the others in terms of percentage of GDP. We also have one of the highest poverty rates compared to other major nations, a dubious record we held even before the recent recession. Any country that ignores these matters cannot legitimately lay claim to greatness.

So, people like me can make a strong case for the President’s agenda, I believe, but we’re lonely voices crying in the wilderness. On a good day my readership barely breaks into double digits. We need the Party leadership to make the case and frankly, to date, they have done a miserable job of framing this story in simple terms that ordinary people can understand. Even though the President is making a surge at the 11th hour to rally the base, it may be too little too late.

Besides, Democratic candidates, facing the rising tide of support for Tea Party candidates are running away from the President and refashioning their separate narratives to address public fear and anger in their states and districts. To be fair, they have the unenviable job of running on a platform of “here’s what would have happened if we had not” and “here is what financial regulatory reform, health reform, and research into renewable forms of energy will do over the long term.” That’s a tough sale at any time. It’s easy to trump a long, discursive explanation with a clever one-liner that fits on a yard sign. Besides, to a society used to instant gratification, it just doesn’t play well generally.

My nephew Kevin, also an Obama supporter, sees broader factors at play. “People feel so overwhelmed about how life works in the late 20th and early 21st century,” he writes, citing a number of factors that contribute to these feelings, that “they want their president to provide comforting myths that assuage their sense of estrangement. Ronald Reagan, rather than the great communicator, was, to me, the great myth maker,” says Kevin. “Bush, clumsier, managed to do the same thing in his walk tall, shoot from the hip, sneer at pointy heads’ demeanor. Obama is the transformational man, and the country isn't ready for him. Americans say they want straight talk, but don't talk to them about needing to change."

Sadly, I fear Kevin may be on to something. But, if we are not ready for a transformational leader now, then when? How long can we kick that can down the road? How long can we be seduced by the “gain without pain” philosophy enshrined most recently, for example, in the Republican’s vacuous “Pledge to America.” Or the call by various Tea Party candidates for dismantling much of the Federal government, including the IRS? Or cutting funds for education and research in favor of tax cuts for the rich? Or continuing to buy into the long ago discredited “trickle down theory” based on the idea that if we take care of the wealthy with tax cuts and eliminate regulatory restraints on special interests, the benefits will trickle down to the needy? Sounds to me like the scriptural story of the scraps from Lazarus’s table writ large. Besides, we saw that it didn’t work under President Reagan or during the George W. Bush presidency when the average earning power of the middle class fell steadily despite massive tax cuts for the wealthy.

Do we really want to go back to that, now that we are on the road to economic recovery, revitalizing long-neglected programs for education and research, and regaining the respect of our allies around the world? There’s a real chance we will because, as history attests, the electorate’s short-term memory is woefully deficient and the soothing siren song of the Republicans can be very tantalizing, making us easily forget what got us into this mess in the first place.