When the Tea Party movement emerged last year, it was greeted as grass-roots movements on the right always are — with sneering and derision by those on the left and in the elite media.
Once again, knuckle-dragging troglodytes from flyover backwaters have some ideas about how the country should be run. A few hundred thousand of them even relinquished their white-knuckle grip on their guns and religion long enough to travel to Washington and demand their concerns be heard. How quaint.
Despite Tea Partiers’ popularity — an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll last month showed the Tea Party label outpolling Democrats and Republicans in terms of favorability — epithets are still flung with regularity.
National Public Radio recently used your tax dollars to post a cartoon on its Web site called “Learn to Speak Tea Bag,” which portrayed members of the movement as stupid with all the subtlety of a rhinoceros in a Swarovski shop. NPR defended the cartoon on the grounds of satire, but that’s a pretty hollow defense considering that NPR has publicly complained on multiple occasions about NPR correspondents who appear on Fox News, as if the cross-pollination here might taint National Palestinian Radio’s vaunted reputation for objectivity.
That supposedly impartial news outlets think nothing of hurling the lewd and crude “tea bag” insult is pretty revealing, to say nothing of their lack of reverence for American history.
But let them continue to dismiss the Tea Party. They do so at their peril. It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Tea Party is both far more sophisticated than its opponents realize and an electoral force to be reckoned with.
The liberal rap on Tea Partiers is that the movement is dragging the Republicans so far to the right that pretty soon the P in GOP is going to stand for Pinochet. Or at least that was the narrative coming out of the recent congressional election in upstate New York, where grass-roots outrage forced the Republican In Name Only candidate Dede Scozzafava out of the race. The more conservative Tea Party-approved candidate Doug Hoffman entered into the race as a Republican and lost.
Supposedly, the lesson here is that Hoffman was too conservative to win in the Northeast.
But Hoffman came awfully close to winning under unusual circumstances. Now Tea Party opponents have to explain Scott Brown, who’s running in the Massachusetts special Senate election. Brown is an independent-thinking, pro-choice Republican — a likable guy from Wrentham who drives a truck.
He may be more liberal than most Republicans, but he’s well-suited to represent Massachusetts. He’s narrowly ahead in a number of polls, and just raised an astounding $1.3 million in a single day.
Smart Democrats are starting to wake up. Brown may still be an underdog Republican running for the seat recently held by Ted Kennedy, but that’s almost beside the point.
Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos and a driving force behind the Democratic “netroots” that helped Democrats win back Congress, is favorably comparing the Scott Brown race with early netroots efforts.
“Scott Brown reminds me of Paul Hackett,” Moulitsas said on Twitter, referring to an Ohio special congressional election in 2005. The Democrat Hackett lost, but the way liberal grass roots rallied to Hackett’s campaign prepared them for future elections. “Like Hackett, Brown will lose, but grass-roots [conservatives are] learning how to better organize.”
It appears that Tea Partiers aren’t just a bunch of reactionary simpletons devoted to supporting the most conservative candidate available — it’s lively and organic political movement that is thinking strategically about getting people elected.
Welcome to your worst nightmare, Democrats. Keep yukking it up — those insults will be cold comfort when Tea Parties break out across America in November.
Mark Hemingway is an editorial page staff writer. He can be reached at [email protected].
