The Tea Party and the Future of the GOP
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2010-09-02/tea-party-and-future-gop
Alaska's Republican primary voters ousted incumbent Senator Lisa Murkowski for a more conservative candidate: The power of Tea Party activists, religious conservatives and the future of the GOP.
Guests
Kate Zernike
a national correspondent for The New York Times and member of the team that shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Her book, "Boiling Mad -Inside Tea Party America," will be published in September.
Geoff Garin
Democratic pollster, Peter D. Hart Research Associates
Stephen Moore
member of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
Comments
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Interesting show! How many tea party members realize that the party is so highly funded by the Koch Brothers?
From Adrienne Marks in Dallas TX
I am so fed up with the tea party and conservatives complaining about the way things are that I just joined the Democratic Party in Texas. Let's focus on the similar concerns and discuss options. Casting stones never got anything done. We are the 'UNITED" States of America. COme on people - let's work together!!!!
About those numbers. The AirPhoto group counted heads and got to 87,000, granting a margin of error of about 9,000. One commentator who arrived at the Mall at mid-morning said the discrepancies (the claims of a quarter of a million or more!) may be explained by something he saw as he entered: people were already streaming out. I suppose the (costly!) solution would be to AirPhoto two or three times during a rally and find an average. Otherwise, the fans will continue to exaggerate and the rest of us will scrape around for more realistic numbers.
About fear: Glenn Beck for years has been stirring up fear -- and then selling solutions. See the Beck's bunker movement and selling dried/powdered foods for the bunker! He's a real huckster -- successful, venal, and probably ephemeral.
The reporter mentioned the concern of the Tea-Party folks concern about how much the government is spending, but isn't it hypocritical of them to criticize the government, while their benefactor has received at least $84 million from the same government.
The Tea Party members state they are "Constitutionalists" and some carry a tiny copy of the Constitution, but they admit they either haven't read it or don't know it. They however, claim to understand what it "means".
I wish someone would explain how American principles like "common good" and teamwork transform into socialism et al.
The Tea Party seems to want the most vulnerable to be abandoned.
One of your guests stated that he spoke with a someone sithe the National Park Service who estimated the Beck rally crowd to be 250,000. Does this person have a name?
It is also a fact that The National Park Service stopped doing crowd counts in 1997 after the agency was accused of underestimating numbers for the 1995 Million Man March.
Could your guests please comment on the role of Charles and David Koch with regard to the Tea Party and on Jame Mayer's article in the August New Yorker "Billionaires against Obama"?
Thank you.
Economics is a matter of interpretation, but its hard to argue that the financial situation has been caused by peoples who pretended to understand and now claim to have not known all along the consequences of capitalism. I refer to specifically the Ratings Agencies, Mutual Fund managers, and more than others all those Insurance Salesman that pretend to be Financial Advisers. The T party refuses to blame those that are close to them and would rather focus somewhere they can't reach.
I take issue with the comment about today's tea partiers being yesterday's Perot voters.
I was a Perot voter. I feel we were concerned about government spending and losing jobs to other countries.
Tea Partiers are woefully ignorant who wrap themselves in the flag, clutch their bibles and use this movement as a cover for deep seated racism. Just exactly what do the tea partiers think they need to take the country back from???
What concerns me the most is a government made up of extremist on both sides.
IF YOUR GUEST WOULD LIKE TO COMMENT OF WHETHER TEA PARTY GROUP WILL LIKE TO GET WORK DONE IN WASHINGTON REGARDING ANY ISSUE OR WHAT DO THEY ACTUALLY WANT. WHERE IS THERE IDEAS. BECAUSE EVEN WITH THE GOP MINORITY EVERY ISSUE THAT COME FOR A VOTE WAS "NO".
I am convinced that the "not one of us" comments stems not from the fact that President Obama is not an American citizen, but simply because he is black. I know many Tea Party members who have come from racist backgrounds, they have dropped the racist rhetoric and now have picked up on the "birther" and "socialist" negative rhetoric.
My goodness!! are you going to let that WSJ hack get away with such a baseless comment. The Republicans chose to block everything that BO was going to do, not because they opposed the policy, but because of the hope of seeing him fail. They even backtracked on policies, like immigration, they had supported. Need we remember, the health care bill that passed was virtually indistinguishable from the one Mitt Romney had put forth.
One of the commentators said that the Tea Partiers are very well informed.
My several friends who identify with the them get their news solely from Fox and conservative talk radio hosts. They say the other media are biased.
On the contrary, I think they are only hearing what the Far Right Conservative movement, who funds these sources, wants them to hear.
They get emotional about the fringe issues, like the NY mosque, and seldom can discuss the core economic and social issues outside of the catch phrases and signboard statements they are fed by the right media.
Your guest just commented that Obama erred in gaining few/no GOP votes in passing the stimulus bill, because he 'failed to reach out' to Republicans. But did he not repeatedly meet with both House and Senate Republicans? And did he not, as a matter of record, invite them to further discussions? What more could he have done, other than simply surrender to their demands (only tax cuts, virtually no other elements). As is, he included a number of GOP elements (weighted much more toward tax cuts than Democrats desired), yet no GOP votes were forthcoming. That's not a failure on Obama's part.
Were is Pres. Obama is a leftest, a liberal or progressive? He isn't he's to the right of center and nearly all of his top administration is leftover Bush people or Wall Street or corporation people. I wish the president was to the left but he is not. He has completely forgotten about the ones that elected him.
The "tough" issues facing Congress wouldn't be so tough if the Congressmen weren't always working to get reelected, but instead worked for the best interest of the country. That raises the issue of instituting term limits for
Congressmen. For example, one term but a longer time, such as 8 years for Senators and 4 years for Representatives.
Stephen Moore is Quite delusional if he believes Americans will ever stop blaming Bush for what he did.
I'm something that is no longer welcome in the GOP: a Rockefeller Republican or a RINO in the current vernacular. To me, the GOP and the Tea Party movement increasingly represent fear, greed and hate in this country. Until this changes, I won't be able to support them.
That shout/interrupt /talk-over business (followed by a giggle) isn't something that the DR show is praised for. Who's doing it?
I would like to challenge two comments made by Stephen Moore. First, he cites the activism and engagement of the Tea Party as a "healthy" development, likening it to the enthusiasm generated by the candidacy of Barak Obama and the hope for policy change he represented. Is all citizen activism, of whatever type, healthy for democracy? Aren't substantial elements of the Tea Party, including those that falsely label the popularly elected president a dictator, a socialist, and even a foreigner with terrorist sympathies in fact destructive rather than constructive?
Second, Moore asserts that the Democratic Party has moved "far to the left." I challenge him to identify specific components of such an ideological shift. This is simply the rhetorical device of those on the right who want to propagate the notion that there is a balance between the growing extremism on the right and supposed extremism on the left.
Stephen Moore sounds very partisan. How can he write a balanced article about Senator DeMint if they are friends? Also, he is rudely talking over the other guests.
The suggestion that Barack Obama has not reached out to the Republicans is baloney. He has bent over backwards to such an extent that they see his eagerness to please and be liked by all as a weakness, and they have capitalized on this by voting as a block against ANYTHING he proposes regardless of how it might hurt the public. This is the way they believe (and rightly) they will come back to power. In Obama's approach, he has alienated the very people who elected him...that is where his poll numbers are slipping...he should have paid attention to who elected him, and not the Republicans.
Secondly, "he is not one of us" a not-so coded message for "he is black"--and everyone tip=toes around this....and they can say that oh no it's because he's ...fill in the blanks...marxist, socialist, foreign, muslim...etc etc etc, and get away with it.
It is outrageous to me to hear this man from the Wall Street Journal claim that the Democrats have moved "so far to the left." Since the so-called 'Regan Revolution,' the Democrats have moved farther and farther right. Clinton was exceptionally friendly to the corporate lobby. And Obama's reforms are wildly moderate. The healthcare bill, for instance, is very much pro-business. It is almost identical to the bill led by Mitt Romney as Governor of Massachusetts. The thing is, Obama's moderation is met with hysteria from the Right and cable news and talk radio. So it's not that Democrats have moved to the Left. But that the entire political system has jerked to right in the steadfast service of the corporate lobby.
I listen to the DR show because of the thoughtful discussion and the ability of the guests to make their comments unfettered from interruption. The gentleman from the WSJ interrupted his guest not once, not twice, but three times (liberal economists, John McCain, etc). Tell him we need a cogent debater who allows others to speak when it is their turn.
The WSJ reporter
It seems to me that the Tea Party, which grew initially by disrupting public meetings and intentionally misinforming the public about health care reform, may produce short-term benefits for the GOP, but will produce long-term challenges for the country.
Politicians either feed or allow wholly false statements, which those in the Tea Party wish to be true, to continue unabated in order to get votes and win elections. Doing so may feed those masses with what they want to believe, but it harms the union.
For example, birthers, deathers, and those who refuse to acknowledge the separation of church and state simply because they disagree do an irrefutable harm. If the truth is always subject to interpretation, that weakens even the most fundamental rights and ideals that shape this experiment known as the United States.
Everything cannot and should not be up for grabs or subject to interpretation, and outright falsehoods must be recognized and called out as such.
The Tea Party embraces many falsehoods because they want to believe them, irrespective of facts.
I have spoken with several tea party people and in each case there are very simple "antidotes" for their thinking. While most wouldn't admit they were wrong, most do suffer from horrible misinformation and having a plain discussion about some basic truths make things far less contentious.
My Tea Party antidotes:
1. Ask what they want to cut from government. This is usually varied such as Dept of Education, government waste, welfare, etc. Then pivot with some simple truths of what these programs do for them. The DoE funding your local schools, which most everyone has attended and help prevent high school dropouts that lead to crime and welfare costs. You want that, right?
2. Ask them about taxes. Usually they will say that they want lower taxes. Inform them about how tax cuts for high income and wealthy have pushed program costs down on middle income families, and blown up the deficit. Most taxes have always been paid by the wealthy and they've gotten their way to lower their tax burdens, to the detriment of our future. We can't have the largest defense budget in the free world and low taxes on the wealthy - period.
3. Focus them on what's really wrong with our economy. The effects of globalization (importing cheaply made goods from China, etc), the personal irresponsibility of people bidding up home prices with debt (nobody put a gun to anyone's head to buy that McMansion) which truly drove the bubble, and so forth.
If you don't know what programs do for you, they look wasteful. A generation or two has gone by since most of them were enacted and they need to be re-educated as to why they were done.
Guests totality unprofessional turned it off.