Quote Of The Day: Tea Parties Were Politically Significant
The political Quote of the Day is actually a pair of quotes dealing with yesterday’s conservative Republican tea parties held throughout the country.
Marc Ambinder sees it this way:
The of tea-party enthusiasm on the American right has provoked a fairly typical reaction from the organized American left. It’s a fake. It involves tea bags and (a) Dick Armey. It’s got the consistency of astroturf, not natural grass. The right, meanwhile, has responded ferociously to the charges that the parties were organized au naturelle by closing ranks, claiming themselves the inheritors of a intellectual tradition beginning with Rosseau through Thomas Pain through Hayek. The right looks more ridiculous than the left at this point, if only because conservatives don’t have much muscle memory when it comes to protesting en masse. But the tea parties really are something. Their origins — organic, programmatic, accidental or otherwise — don’t matter much anymore. If — and we’ll have to see the numbers at the end of the day — 100,000 Americans show up to protest their taxes, the onus to dismiss them as a nascent political force shifts to the Democrats. There’s no evidence that official Republican strategists connected with the Republican National Committee, John Boehner’s office or the NRSC had the insight to conceive of these events, much less to try and bigfoot the organizers.
…. But I also think that we’re too obsessed with the distinction between the top and the bottom of a blade of grass. At some point, critical mass is reached and astroturf campaigns can work — they can catalyze genuine anger and channel it into meaningful political participation.
And Pajamas Media’s Jennifer Rubin sees some political potential — and danger –for the GOP:
But Republicans should not be rejoicing quite yet. Many protesters went out of their way to say they are upset with both parties and hold George W. Bush equally responsible for launching the now never-ending stream of bailouts. And the crowd, if anything, was libertarian in bent rather than conservative. These people are advocating less government, restraints on federal power, and a return to “constitutional government.” Social conservatives who seek expansion of state power on issues from abortion to support for faith-based programs may find themselves at odds with a newly invigorated movement to shrink government and enhance individual liberty.
It is not clear whether this is the making of a new political party or a flash in the pan. What it does show is that the absence of a single Republican leader does not hinder some impressive grassroots organizing. It also shows that young conservatives, who were out in abundance in Lafayette Park even in the pouring rain, do know how to organize through new media including Twitter. And it shows that for conservatives and libertarians, the Obama presidency is a powerful organizing tool. Just as the Left coalesced in opposition to George W. Bush, these activists are, to a large extent, acting out of resentment and anger toward the president and Democratic congressional leaders.
The proof will be in the pudding. If we see an influx of new candidates, activists, and volunteers stemming from the tea party movement, Wednesday will be seen as a significant day in modern political history and new media-based organizing. If the activists go home, never to be seen again, then the day will recede in memory as another failed attempt to shake the political status quo. Stay tuned.
55 Responses to “Quote Of The Day: Tea Parties Were Politically Significant”
Well, greendreams, I tried to take up your challenge and I've been studying that link for the past hour. I've type several paragraphs and then realized I was misreading it and deleted them. In the end, I cannot meet the challenge with this info, and here's why:
Reduction of deficit should be a high priority precisely because reducing the amount of money servicing the debt would allow us to spend that money on more useful things like alternative energy, climate change, education, and tax cuts. Money towards the debt is wasted money, by and large. And so what I want to do is find government programs that I generally approve of but that are not as important as reducing that debt. And yet, unless I'm still misreading, all this page provides is the amount of requested discretionary spending by agency. (It only seems to provide specific programs for things that are expiring.) It's impossible to say which of the programs within each agency are good but not as good as debt reduction. HUD, for instance, is going up from 37.4 to 38.5. Now, I definitely think that HUD has good programs. Are there any that are good but not as good as debt reduction? No idea; I'd be guessing, and so I can't say what the right number for this agency should be.
In short, I need the 200 page version, but I don't have time to go through the 200 page version.
I agree with paca that without much greater detail, the numbers are pretty meaningless. Even if I had the time or inclination to study the 200 page version, I probably still wouldn't know if the dollars proposed were going to be spent efficiently, either.
And that's the broad problem with expanded federal government. At least if programs were administered closer to home we'd have SOME chance of having some oversight over it. I have a pretty good sense of how my municipal government scores on spending efficiency and efficacy, less so with state, and when it comes to federal all I can say is that the numbers are so vast and the tendency to rationalize increased funding year after year for agencies that fail to meet the stated goals (the failures being used to actually justify the increases instead of self evaluation of how the existing funding level could be used more wisely), that I have to presume waste in most cases.
Charities get scored on the percentage of funds going to the end service vs. administrative costs. Where's there a similar analysis of each government agency and program?
cs – I heard someone say recently that Obama's promise to go line by line looking for waste has been attempted before but everyone always gives up because the cost of doing all of the analysis is higher than the amount of potential savings.
Sorry, but you bought that line of crap? Come on, you are smarter than that. There are hundreds of millions, no, make that multiple BILLIONS of dollars of waste in the budget.
The cost to do a true analysis is not the blocking factor. The political capital is what is too high. Too many powerful Senator's and Congressman's pet projects (i.e., the paybacks that keep them in office) would get stepped on. And too much anger from the masses, as well. After all, the true reality is that spending that benefits me is never pork, and it is SO easy to negative campaign, especially at the local level, against anything that affects the gravy train.
LOL, well, I'm not inclined to buy the excuses generally, but I can see some potential truth in that.
And really, the point is that the process of looking line by line from the top down is going to be so politicized that I think the across the board cuts make more sense. That way, the analysis still has to get done by the top bureaucrats, who are a bit more removed from the corrupting influence of lobbyists.
Forget, please, “conservatism.” It has been, operationally, de facto, Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson's Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:
“[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth.”
Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com
PS – And “Mr. Worldly Wiseman” Rush Limbaugh never made a bigger ass of himself than at CPAC where he told that blasphemous “joke” about himself and God.