Mark Tapscott: Tea Party leaders are wasting chance to replace Congress UPDATED!
By: Mark Tapscott
Editorial Page Editor
September 3, 2009
It's not often that leaders of the moment's most significant political movement miss the critically important public opinion shift of their time, but that is exactly what is happening right now with the Tea Party crusade.
Just when 57 percent of the American people - including most independents - are ready to throw all the bums out of Congress and start over, Tea Party leaders are wasting time, resources and their precious credibility fighting a comparatively minor skirmish with the unions.
Don't get me wrong, I admire Whole Foods Chief Executive Officer John Mackey, whose courageous critique of Obamacare has put him and his innovative operation square in the cross hairs of a union-led boycott on the left side of the blogosphere.
Mackey's sin was to write recently in the Wall Street Journal that Obamacare is fatally flawed because, like food and shelter, health care is "best provided through voluntary and mutually beneficial market exchanges," not government bureaucracies.
Earlier this week, Tea Party leaders began a nationwide "buycott" designed to counter the union-led boycott.
"We're taking the Alinsky boycott tactic and we're turning it on its head. We're making a positive statement of support, showing that fiscally conservative Americans have purchasing power, and we are more than willing to exercise it in support of great companies like Whole Foods and great CEOs like John Mackey," said Michael Patrick Leahy, a spokesman for the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition.
Any other time, I would cheer such an endeavor, but right now it is a deeply dismaying distraction from the most important business at hand - ridding Washington of the entrenched, bipartisan, corrupt, self-serving political class running this nation into bankruptcy.
A seismic public opinion shift occurred this summer that Scott Rasmussen was first to measure - a clear majority of the American people, critically including two-thirds of independents, are ready to vote them all out and start over with a new Congress.
But the crucial fact here is not the 57 percent of Rasmussen's respondents who favor such action. Fully 59 percent said the same thing last October when Congress and the Bush administration were busily throwing $700 billion at Wall Street, allegedly to prevent an economic meltdown of unimagined severity.
The key here is that President Barack Obama and his Democratic congressional allies have moved so far to the left that they have forced a monumental shift among independents, and it was the Obamacare proposal to replace doctors with federal bureaucrats that made it happen.
Notes Rasmussen: "While Democrats have become more supportive of the legislators, voters not affiliated with either major party have moved in the opposite direction. Today, 70 percent of those not affiliated with either major party would vote to replace all of the elected politicians in the House and Senate. That's up from 62 percent last year."
Opportunities like this come along once in a political lifetime. Instead of worrying about Whole Foods, the Tea Party leadership should be figuring out how to channel this tidal shift in American public opinion into concrete results in next year's congressional elections.
Being nonpartisan, the Tea Party movement must identify and encourage like-minded candidates in both major parties. That means a Tea Party Movement Seal of Approval, or a Tea Party Pledge, to point voters of all stripes to the new blood needed to replace the current calcified cast of establishment insiders running Congress.
Most Americans are fed up with business-as-usual in Washington and they want real change, not more of the Democrats' power-grabbing slogans, or the "Me-Too" timidity of Republicans who talk the reform talk, but love the perks of power too much to actually walk it.
Yes, getting a loosely organized grass-roots movement like the Tea Party Coalition to agree on a set of fundamental principles is tough, and I don't claim to know how to do it.
What I do know is this: Any candidate for Congress who opposes term limits cannot be trusted to put the national interest ahead of his own selfish political interest. And any candidate who claims the federal budget can't be balanced without a tax increase is playing political games. As Reagan said, the problem is not that people are taxed too little, it's that government spends too much.
There's your starting point, folks.
UPDATE: Not all Tea Party groups doing buycott
I am reminded that there are several branches of the Tea Party movement. The buycott is a project of the National Tea Party Coalition, then there are the Tea Party Patriots, which doesn't appear to be involved, at least officially, with buycott. No doubt there are other groups that I have missed and I apologize for the oversight. Send me an email at mark.tapscott@gmail.com with a link and I will your group to this graph.
UPDATE II: Please read my revised graph on balanced budget and tax increases
Since posting this column, I've realized the original wording of the reference in the next to last graph about balancing the federal budget without a tax increase conveyed exactly the wrong point. So I have revised it to make clear that I am saying politicians who claim the budget cannot be balanced unless taxes are increased are playing games. The problem is too much government spending, not too little tax revenue.
UPDATE III: Erickson on protest signs and campaign signs
Red State's Erick Erickson's assessment of the column above gets right to the critical point. The bottomline on activism in a democratic republic is always how are your actions reflected in the results on election night. That's why we get the government we deserve. It's all up to us.
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