Fears that Wednesday’s Tea Party Protests would fizzle due to inclement weather and nagging suspicion that the 2008 election hangover may remain proved groundless, as more than 700 such gatherings attracted hundreds of thousands of people. It takes all of about 10 seconds of scanning the thousands of Tea Party photographs and video posted on the Internet to see how utterly disconnected from reality are claims that the Tea Party Protests were mere Astroturf insidiously choreographed by Rush Limbaugh and Roger Ailes.
The reality is that millions of Americans are deeply worried about the unexpected and unprecedented direction the country is taking under President Obama and the Democratic Congress led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Americans thought they were electing a president who would seek tax cuts for “95 percent of all working families,”“a net spending reduction” in the federal budget, and a Congress that got the message on earmarks.
Instead, Obama, Reid and Pelosi have adopted a $3.6 trillion spending plan that includes a $1 trillion deficit this year, deficits almost as large as far as the eye can see thereafter, and thousands more earmarks buried in every legislative corner and cranny. They are also preparing an energy plan sure to impose severe new costs on all who pay a monthly utility bill, and they plan the biggest expansion of federal bureaucracy and regulation since the Great Society. People protest because they know these policies mean a future of economic stagnation, shortages and rationing of essentials like health care, and a crushing public debt that will burden their children and grand children. It is no wonder then that before reaching his 100th day in office Obama has become the most divisive president of modern American history.
But one day of nationwide Tea Party Protests is only a beginning. The question now is what is the next step for this still-gathering movement? The Examiner suggests three maxims to guide the movement: First, don’t abandon the social networking and bottom-up direction that enabled a genuine grassroots phenomenon to coalesce in just a few weeks. Top-down, command-economy management from Washington got us into the current mess. Second, all politics is still local. As National Review Online’s Jim Geraghty points out, it’s one thing for 1,000 people to demonstrate at the White House, and something else again for the same number to pack a city council or county supervisors meeting demanding an end to the waste and political gamesmanship. Today’s local tremor eventually becomes an earthquake in Washington. Third, stop worrying about the mainstream media. Their day is done, yours is coming.
