In the last twenty-four hours, President Obama and Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., each compared the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, but Frank derided the Tea Party for “incoherence” while Obama seemed perfectly willing to summarize their message and equate them with the Tea Party.
Frank commented on the Tea Party and “the incoherence of their message” during an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, but said the Tea Party had power in the Republican Party because “they voted.” Frank did not consider that the Tea Party supported, overwhelmingly, the Republican Party because the GOP advocated their positions. Paradoxically, Frank called the Tea Party as “follower[s] of Michele Bachmann,” even while professing that the Tea Party had no coherent message. Doesn’t a movement ostensibly led by a single presidential candidate – which the Tea Party isn’t, but, just to accept Frank’s assumptions for the sake of argument – with a platform necessarily have a united message?
President Obama recognizes a coherent message among the Tea Partiers and also in the Occupy Wall Street crowd. “I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests,” Obama said of the Occupy Wall Streeters during an ABC interview, adding that “they’re not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party.”
Obama tried to coopt both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street crowd into his talking points, saying that Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren’t looking out for them.”
That’s not the first time Obama tried to associate himself with the Tea Party, as when he claimed that “the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office.” Brown won his 2009 special election Senate campaign on an anti-Obamacare platform from which he promised to be the 41st vote against the bill.
Frank and Obama present two clear ways of misunderstanding the Tea Party. For Frank to say that the Tea Party is incoherent but call for the Occupy Wall Street Movement to form a counterweight by voting Democrat is truly “incoherent.” Obama’s careless blending of the Tea Party with the forces that brought him to power in 2008 is simply baffling.
