Misreading the tea leaves: Media can't figure out the tea party
By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger
April 18, 2010, 6:30AM
Tony Kurdzuk/The Star-LedgerA Tea Party rally in front of the Statehouse in Trenton on April 15, 2010.
Watching my fellow members of the media try to dissect the tea party movement is endlessly amusing. They tend to seize on the first thing they encounter and then employ it to describe the rest. The effect is that of a man approaching a smorgasbord, picking out the boiled potatoes, and then deciding Swedes must be vegetarians.
As a connoisseur of conservatism, I like to sample from all the plates. So when the tea partiers congregated on the steps of the Statehouse Thursday, I gravitated to the John Birch Society table.
Like the tea partiers, the Birch Society is something of a blank screen upon which people project their emotions. The actual subject matter of the society?s publications would put most Americans to sleep. Do you care how your congressman voted on H.R. 3183, the Energy-Water Appropriations bill? If so, you can find out by picking up the Freedom Index pamphlet the Birchers put out. I did and I found that the only House member with a 100 percent rating from the society is Ron Paul, the once and perhaps future presidential contender from Texas.
This is exactly the sort of thing that drives my fellow members of the mainstream media crazy. They want to put the John Birchers in one box, presumably a box filled with mobs of angry people holding pitchforks. But mention Ron Paul and they construct another box, one you might find in Amsterdam. It?s filled with advocates of legalized drugs and open prostitution.
Yet Paul, who first employed the tea party theme in his 2008 campaign, and the Birchers agree on most of the issues that matter these days. So who?s on the other side?
Most of those self-proclaimed ?right-wing? radio talk show hosts, that?s who. I found that out when I got to chatting with the guy behind the table, 56-year-old Kip Webster of Ringwood.
The subject of our conversation was radio talker Mark Levin, who recently decided to turn down an invitation to speak at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington because the Birchers were a co-sponsor.
?He?s at best a useful idiot,? said Webster of Levin. I hadn?t heard that term since the Cold War. Webster went into a long dissertation on how the adherents of so-called ?neo? conservatism ? a group that includes just about all the radio talkers ? are the ideological inheritors of the Trotskyite tradition.
The details of that debate are too involved to recount here. I?m just bringing it up to point out that there?s a fault line in American politics invisible to the mainstream media. Though the tea party people are literally all over the map, on the whole they represent a return to traditional American values that weren?t in evidence in the big-spending, big-government George W. Bush era.
In those bad old days, Republicans took the view that it?s the responsibility of the American taxpayer to accomplish Bush?s stated goal of ending tyranny on Earth. The tea partiers tend to lean more toward the Texas congressman?s view that both our Constitution and our finances preclude that sort of thing.
All of this greatly bothers the Republican establishment. Hence the attempt to cast Alaskan airhead Sarah Palin as some sort of leader of the movement.
But the New York Times, in one of the few accurate portrayals of the tea party movement, noted that a poll of its supporters found ?A plurality do not think Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.? The article also noted that those who attend tea party rallies are wealthier and more educated than the average American.
This is why the Republican establishment is worried. Though the rally was held within hearing of his office, Gov. Chris Christie did not make the short walk to the steps. Perhaps that was because some of the partiers held signs demanding that he order his attorney general to join the lawsuit against health care reform, something Paula Dow refuses to do for reasons that remain undisclosed.
Meanwhile, in the audience I met one of the candidates challenging the GOP establishment in the congressional primaries this year. Anna Little, a constitutional conservative who is mayor of Highlands in Monmouth County, is running against the party pick, multimillionaire Diane Gooch, for the Republican nomination in the race against Democratic incumbent Frank Pallone.
By the way, there?s also a tea party candidate running in the Democratic primary against Pallone, who was a prime sponsor of health care reform. Mark Falzon is running under the slogan ?Democrat: Tea Party Approved.?
Democratic tea partiers? That doesn?t fit into any media box either. A lot of what?s happening doesn?t. And when it comes to tea parties, the talking heads should stop talking for a while and try listening.
ALSO: Read Justin Raimondo's piece on the Ron Paul phenomenon and the roots of the tea parties
By Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger
April 18, 2010, 6:30AM
Watching my fellow members of the media try to dissect the tea party movement is endlessly amusing. They tend to seize on the first thing they encounter and then employ it to describe the rest. The effect is that of a man approaching a smorgasbord, picking out the boiled potatoes, and then deciding Swedes must be vegetarians.
As a connoisseur of conservatism, I like to sample from all the plates. So when the tea partiers congregated on the steps of the Statehouse Thursday, I gravitated to the John Birch Society table.
Like the tea partiers, the Birch Society is something of a blank screen upon which people project their emotions. The actual subject matter of the society?s publications would put most Americans to sleep. Do you care how your congressman voted on H.R. 3183, the Energy-Water Appropriations bill? If so, you can find out by picking up the Freedom Index pamphlet the Birchers put out. I did and I found that the only House member with a 100 percent rating from the society is Ron Paul, the once and perhaps future presidential contender from Texas.
This is exactly the sort of thing that drives my fellow members of the mainstream media crazy. They want to put the John Birchers in one box, presumably a box filled with mobs of angry people holding pitchforks. But mention Ron Paul and they construct another box, one you might find in Amsterdam. It?s filled with advocates of legalized drugs and open prostitution.
Yet Paul, who first employed the tea party theme in his 2008 campaign, and the Birchers agree on most of the issues that matter these days. So who?s on the other side?
Most of those self-proclaimed ?right-wing? radio talk show hosts, that?s who. I found that out when I got to chatting with the guy behind the table, 56-year-old Kip Webster of Ringwood.
The subject of our conversation was radio talker Mark Levin, who recently decided to turn down an invitation to speak at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington because the Birchers were a co-sponsor.
?He?s at best a useful idiot,? said Webster of Levin. I hadn?t heard that term since the Cold War. Webster went into a long dissertation on how the adherents of so-called ?neo? conservatism ? a group that includes just about all the radio talkers ? are the ideological inheritors of the Trotskyite tradition.
The details of that debate are too involved to recount here. I?m just bringing it up to point out that there?s a fault line in American politics invisible to the mainstream media. Though the tea party people are literally all over the map, on the whole they represent a return to traditional American values that weren?t in evidence in the big-spending, big-government George W. Bush era.
In those bad old days, Republicans took the view that it?s the responsibility of the American taxpayer to accomplish Bush?s stated goal of ending tyranny on Earth. The tea partiers tend to lean more toward the Texas congressman?s view that both our Constitution and our finances preclude that sort of thing.
All of this greatly bothers the Republican establishment. Hence the attempt to cast Alaskan airhead Sarah Palin as some sort of leader of the movement.
But the New York Times, in one of the few accurate portrayals of the tea party movement, noted that a poll of its supporters found ?A plurality do not think Sarah Palin is qualified to be president.? The article also noted that those who attend tea party rallies are wealthier and more educated than the average American.
This is why the Republican establishment is worried. Though the rally was held within hearing of his office, Gov. Chris Christie did not make the short walk to the steps. Perhaps that was because some of the partiers held signs demanding that he order his attorney general to join the lawsuit against health care reform, something Paula Dow refuses to do for reasons that remain undisclosed.
Meanwhile, in the audience I met one of the candidates challenging the GOP establishment in the congressional primaries this year. Anna Little, a constitutional conservative who is mayor of Highlands in Monmouth County, is running against the party pick, multimillionaire Diane Gooch, for the Republican nomination in the race against Democratic incumbent Frank Pallone.
By the way, there?s also a tea party candidate running in the Democratic primary against Pallone, who was a prime sponsor of health care reform. Mark Falzon is running under the slogan ?Democrat: Tea Party Approved.?
Democratic tea partiers? That doesn?t fit into any media box either. A lot of what?s happening doesn?t. And when it comes to tea parties, the talking heads should stop talking for a while and try listening.
ALSO: Read Justin Raimondo's piece on the Ron Paul phenomenon and the roots of the tea parties
:
The Paul movement was really the GOP?s lifeline to the emerging "tea party" movement, of which it was always an essential ? and certainly a founding ? element.
