Tea Party Alive and Well - Democrats Scared
The Democrats are obsessed with the Tea Party movement. Just last week Washington Post columnist E.J.Dionne declared "Tea Party thinking..dead." What's so hilarious is the inherent contradiction in Dionne's argument. So close to the election no Obama media minion will waste time on a supposedly defunct, irrelevant group of people whose time has come and gone. Yet the media driven lies about the Tea Party Movement abound in Dionne's op-ed.
What should engage us more is that a movement that won the 2010 elections with a bang is trying to triumph just two years later on the basis of a whimper...It turns out that there was no profound ideological conversion of the country two years ago. We remain the same moderate and practical country we have long been.
The fired up crowds greeting the Romney/Ryan duo in states from Colorado to Ohio to Virginia in 2012 must have reminded Dionne of the groundswell of conservative, anti-Obamacare, Taxed Enough Already folks who showed up in DC on 9/12 of 2009.
The media shills paid no greater tribute to the spontaneous uprising than in the display of extraordinary lengths they went to in order to shut it down. Politicians, comedians and mainstream reporters stereotyped regular, tax-paying, freedom-loving Americans as a bunch of racists and right wing extremists.
The attacks didn't stop individuals in the hundreds of tea party groups across the country from gathering steam; eventually running for school boards, local offices, and working on campaigns of like-minded candidates. The Alinsky strategy of not using the same tactics all the time must have rubbed off on the movement. In little more than a year the movement went from tax day protests to a 2010 political victory against Obama's socialist policies.
Now tea party thinkers who once believed they would have to hold their noses and vote for a moderate establishment Republican like Governor Romney are flocking to his campaign rallies. The Left doesn't know what to make of the surge.
All that enthusiasm must be something to do with the 'waning' Tea Party. On Friday Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid mocked Romney's promise to work in a bipartisan spirit when he is elected.
In fact, Mitt Romney's Tea Party agenda has already been rejected in the Senate...Senate Democrats are committed to defending the middle class, and we will do everything in our power to defend them against Mitt Romney's Tea Party agenda.
At three different campaign stops on Thursday and Friday President Obama also accused Romney of shilling for the Tea Party.
[Romney] is pledging to rubber-stamp the tea party agenda in Congress...That's not change...That's what we need to change...[Romney] "told folks he was 'the ideal candidate' for the Tea Party. Now suddenly he's saying, 'what, who, me?'"
And to top it off, on Sunday's Meet the Press White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe warned voters about Romney's alignment with the Tea Party.
Governor Romney if he's elected has promised he'll plunge this Congress and this country into a bitter battle over repealing health care. Do we think that's really going to help the tone in Washington? Absolutely not. He has promised to rubber stamp a Tea Party agenda. You know, Senator Reid, the Democratic leader in the Senate, put out a statement Friday saying, ya know, the Romney agenda is DOA. So the notion that somehow Governor Romney's going to come in here and rubber stamp a Tea Party agenda, plunge the country into a health care fight, and that's going to help solve the dysfunction in Washington, it's going to be worse.
In playing the Tea Party card at the last minute the desperate Dems have not only demonstrated their ignorance of how deeply the spirit of the movement has become ingrained in America's consciousness, but they have managed to validate the power of that movement.
So despite conflicting reports of their demise Tea Party patriots are not going away. A future Romney-Ryan administration would do well to get the rubber stamp out.
Read more M. Catharine Evans at Potter Williams Report