SHOCKER: Anti-Tea Party Web Site Part of Scheme to Funnel Funds.
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FROM THE CINCINNATI TEA PARTY FOLKS: Liberty Snowmen.
POLL: “Three-fourths of independents have a favorable view of the tea party movement and say one-party control of the White House and Congress has been bad.”
PARTY TIME! Bill Whittle on the Tea Parties.
HMM: Sweet Tea for GOP in Alabama. “While last weekend’s Tea Party convention in Nashville was making national headlines, the real political impact of the grassroots movement was evident among Republicans who gathered Friday and Saturday in Montgomery. . . . A native of Trinidad who came to the United States with his parents when he was 8, Phillip could become the first black Republican elected to Congress from the Deep South since Reconstruction. His message of American exceptionalism and limited government draws enthusiastic applause at Tea Party events and has earned the endorsement of Mike Huckabee.”
HMM: Iowa Poll: 33% of Iowans support ‘tea party’ movement. “A third of Iowans from across the political spectrum say they support the ‘tea party’ movement, sounding a loud chorus of dissatisfaction with government, according to The Des Moines Register’s new Iowa Poll. Neither party has a lock on these restless advocates of limited government and fiscal control, according to the poll. However, their conservative leanings appear to give Republicans a greater opportunity than Democrats to make gains at the dawn of a volatile election year.”
AT PJTV, Helen and I interview Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft.
THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND:
My Washington Examiner column on the Tea Party movement and America’s political Great Awakening.
The Great IPCC Meltdown Continues.
Honey, They Shrunk The Private Sector.
Anti-Semitic violence in Europe.
So much for the SOTU bounce. Plus, more on the numbers.
More work from Retracto, the correction alpaca.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: As counter-media fuels tea party movement, main stream media catches on.
UPDATE: Reader Kenneth MacDonald notes some racism:
One caller to C-Span – which aired nearly the entire convention – said the sight of primarily white and older self-described “patriots” frightened her. She said the gathering looked like a lynch mob.
Yeah, if you see a bunch of white folks and the first thing you think is “lynch mob,” you’ve got no business complaining about racism. Because, you know, you’re a racist.
But not everyone felt that way: “A Swedish radio reporter who sent an earnest piece back to Sveriges Radio on Friday, explaining how a modern-day tax revolt movement that appeared at first to be woefully fringe is looking more and more mainstream.” If only American progressives could be as free of racism as the Swedes . . . .
UPDATE: Splitting the liberals? Plus, various readers note that the event wasn’t any whiter than a Kos or Howard Dean meetup. . . ..
THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT: America’s Third Great Awakening. My column at the Washington Examiner.
MARK TAPSCOTT: Sarah Palin is miles ahead of every other politician in America.
Palin also demonstrated an understanding that the Tea Party movement must be independent of both major political parties, which share the blame for the country’s current morass, in order to be credible. She encouraged her Nashville audience “against allowing this movement to be defined by any one leader or any one politician. The tea party movement is not a top-down operation. It’s a ground-up call to action … it’s bigger than any king or queen of the tea party, and it’s a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a teleprompter.”
UPDATE: A.C. Kleinheider is less impressed.
ANOTHER UPDATE: More thoughts from Jennifer Rubin.
MORE: Dan Riehl comments.
STILL MORE: Moe Lane: Speech Was A Rorschach test.
And here’s a roundup from Jack Lail.
LOTS OF VIDEO FROM THE TEA PARTY CONVENTION, including Sarah Palin’s speech from last night, is available here from PJTV.
DEMAND QUESTION TIME: Mike Wilson of the Cincinnati Tea Party emails: “I just signed the petition and will share with the rest of the tea party movement here in Ohio. If you think it would be beneficial, feel free to add the Ohio Liberty Council to the list of sponsors.”
Here’s the petition.
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ED MORRISSEY: “The wins in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts over the last three months did not come from people questioning Obama’s birthplace. They resulted from grassroots opposition to the Obama-Nancy Pelosi policy agenda. Scott Brown won the seat held by the Kennedys and their cronies for almost 60 years by pushing back hard against ObamaCare and the counterterrorism policies of the White House.”
SARAH PALIN’S TEA PARTY CONVENTION SPEECH will be streaming live here.
JUST SOME PEOPLE sitting around in their pajamas.
Plus, a Tea Party Democrat. “Meet Tea Party Democrat Jack Wilson. He is running for Congress in Maryland as an independent!”
Also, Can you hear me now?
A TEA PARTY CONVENTION TEA PARTY PROTEST: This is Antonio Hinton, one of the organizers of the Knoxville Tea Party, one of three folks from the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition who showed up to remind people that there’s more to the Tea Party movement than this convention. The press tried to get him to say something bad about Sarah Palin, but he called her a “breath of fresh air,” instead. It’ll be interesting to see how the story gets played.
UPDATE: More here.
LOTS OF TEA PARTY CONVENTION COVERAGE at PJTV. Interviews with Dana Loesch, Andrew Breitbart, and more. Both live and non-live.
HERE’S THE LINK FOR PJTV COVERAGE OF THE TEA PARTY CONVENTION. Breitbart’s speech will be streaming live about 10 am Eastern.
And here’s an interview with Andrew Breitbart. Plus, I talk to Dana Loesch.
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: The Great Peasant Revolt of 2010. I’m seeing it right here at the Tea Party convention.
RICHARD SHELBY: Unrepentant porker. Somebody put up a Tea Party challenger!
JIM HOFT: ABC Reporter Attacks: “Funny, Berman’s never been this hard on Team Obama.”
THE PRESS CONFERENCE: Funny to think that the Tea Party movement is less than a year old, and that when it started only bloggers were covering it.
HERE’S THE LINK TO PJTV coverage of the Tea Party Convention. I’ve just arrived in Nashville myself.
PJTV LIVE COVERAGE OF THE NATIONAL TEA PARTY CONVENTION is here.
PJTV IS LIVESTREAMING FROM THE TEA PARTY CONVENTION IN NASHVILLE. I’ll be there to join the coverage tomorrow, along with Helen.
MARK TAPSCOTT: Third party is the wrong party for Tea Partiers.
There is no mystery about what most Tea Partiers seek — a limited, transparent government that listens to them and resists ideologues with millennial blueprints to remake America in their own image, minimal taxation and regulation, strong national defense, and an unapologetic commitment to American exceptionalism abroad.
Tea Partiers should seek out or field candidates in both major parties who support those aims and do everything possible to elect them, then hold their feet to the fire of accountability. Just imagine a bipartisan Tea Party Caucus with sufficient numbers in Congress to drive the national agenda.
That could be a conquering army like none before in American politics.
I agree. Don’t emulate the traditional parties — disintermediate them.
TEA PARTY VS. ESTABLISHMENT in Virginia’s 5th district?
CINCINNATI TEA PARTY ORGANIZER MIKE WILSON is running for the Ohio legislature.
WASHINGTON POST: Sarah Palin will rally for Tea Party activists in Harry Reid’s home town.
Hey, it’s not just Sarah Palin. Obama’s been helping out the Tea Party in Nevada, too.
UPDATE: Sarah Palin: Why I’m Speaking At Tea Party Convention.
MORE: Obama apologizes to Harry Reid for bashing Las Vegas.
STILL MORE: A reader emails:
I work for a large bank and used to attend an annual conference in Las Vegas, until Obama declared war on that poor town. Las Vegas hosted the Asset Securitization Forum with about 8000-12000 attendees. It was the perfect place as the facilities are enormous and could handle large amounts of people comfortably, a room at the conference hotel (The Venetian, Wynn,etc.) or one right next door was half what a NY hotel room is, there are cheap, plentiful flights from everywhere and you could see enough clients and contacts to save 10-15 other trips. If you gambled it was with your own money, it’s not like the firm gave you a bundle of cash and told you have fun.
After the One attacked Vegas (And half the people didn’t go last year) the conference was moved this year … to Washington D.C..
The best of hands indeed.
If I were a Nevadan, I’d be unhappy.
MORE STILL: Reader Lennie Smith writes:
I live in Las Vegas and I can tell you it’s not a great place to be these days. The only place worse these days is probably Detroit or the central valley of California – a place where I have a lot of family. We have high funemployment and a high foreclosure rate in Las Vegas. Much higher than the reported number would show due to the independent contractor nature of construction and real estate jobs.
After the president’s remarks in February, quiet a few companies canceled their conventions here and as a result, people who depend on them lost their jobs.
Now he has upped the ante and the only silver lining I can see in this is that it hurts Reid. After a good 50 year run I don’t see the town bouncing back for a long time. We might even have to reinvent ourselves as a ghost town.
I never thought I’d feel sorry for Las Vegas.
FINALLY: Another reader emails:
I just got back from the ASF in National Harbor, Maryland – basically a cluster with one large hotel, the Gaylord National, and a cluster of small ones like Marriott Residential and Hampton Suites. This was the first year I was senior enough to attend as part of my firm’s team, and what a let down. After years of stories about working and playing hard in Vegas, I end up in an isolated, frozen swamp 10 miles outside DC. And yes, I most certainly blame Obama.
An “isolated, frozen swamp.” Sounds like the 9th circle of Hell.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: Contract from America: ‘tea party’ crafts its election manifesto.
Related: Tea Party Star Leads Movement On Her Own Terms. About Keli Carender, aka Liberty Belle, who helped kickstart the whole thing.
THE CONVENTION WILL BE TELEVISED: PJTV will be covering the Tea Party Convention in Nashville. Looks like Helen and I will be there, so we’ll let you know how things turn out!
CHICAGO TV blacking out Lech Walesa? “Unfortunately for Chicago residents, and the Polish community specifically, if you get your news from the city’s local television stations, you might not have even known that he was in town, let alone that he attended a Tea Party, and endorsed Adam Andrzejewski for governor.”
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE POPULAR:
Virginia’s Democratic-controlled state Senate passed measures Monday that would make it illegal to require individuals to purchase health insurance, a direct challenge to the party’s efforts in Washington to reform health care.
The bills, a top priority of Virginia’s “tea party” movement, were approved 23 to 17 as five Democrats who represent swing areas of the state joined all 18 Republicans in the chamber in backing the legislation.
The votes came less than a week after President Obama implored Democrats in Washington not to abandon their health-care efforts, urging them in his State of the Union address not to “run for the hills” on the issue.
But the action in Virginia, a state that backed Obama in 2008, could indicate that the president is failing to reassure members of his own party that current reform efforts remain worthwhile.
Tea Party 1, Obama 0. And that’s just in Virginia.
A RELIABLE READER EMAILS that Rush Limbaugh just endorsed Tea Party-backed Illinois Gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrezejewski. It may be too late to put him over the top — or not, I dunno — but that’s huge.
UPDATE: More here, including a poll that suggests it’ll still be hard for Andrezejewski to make it, but who knows?
MORE: “Holy Mackerel!”
THINGS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND:
My Washington Examiner column on the future of the Tea Party movement.
Nick Gillespie makes libertarianism look good.
Climategate: Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen.
Plus, NASA and NOAA complicit in data manipulation. Also, Climate Panel Shamed By Bogus Rainforest Claim.
Injudicious remarks on terror trials from Robert Gibbs.
More White House Flickr Fun.
Tea Partiers go local.
Arne Duncan: Katrina saved public education in New Orleans.
Andrew Klavan on fantasy vs. reality.
Blue state Hawaii kills gay marriage.
A REALITY CHECK FOR A LAME WASHINGTON ESTABLISHMENT TALKING POINT: From the comments to my Tea Party column in the Washington Examiner:
And how many times did you take to the streets to protest the deficit during the Bush presidency? I’m guessing zero.
You see this kind of thing pop up in comments a lot, and sometimes even out of the mouth of the less-honest variety of pundit. Which means, of course, that once again it’s time to roll out this graphic:
Notice anything? Like maybe how Bush’s deficits are dwarfed by Obama’s? And maybe how the deficit was falling throughout Bush’s second term? Until the very end, when TARP — hardly popular with the Tea Party crowd — rolled out. The “Bush was as big a spender as Obama” line is just a flat-out lie, which the apologists for the powers that be hope you’ll buy because . . . well, because a lie is pretty much all they’ve got at this point.
MY WASHINGTON EXAMINER COLUMN IS UP: More impact is what’s next for the Tea Party movement. (Bumped).
UPDATE: “Do you hear me now?” Plus, further thoughts from Dan Riehl. “A combination of influences appear to be giving rise to an age in American politics in which the American people can finally be heard – and heard without the filter of the mainstream media.”
ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL: Tea Partiers aim to remake local GOP. “They are doing it here by the hundreds by filing as candidates in the May 4 primary election for the office of precinct executive, the lowest rung of the political party structure. . . . It is a strategy that has worked elsewhere – Tea Party activists essentially took over the Nevada Republican Party earlier this month; and, in Florida, they were successful in forcing out a state party chairman who was seen as too centrist.” Ignore the bias — “too centrist” — and note the lesson. It’s often pretty easy to take over your local party apparatus with just a few hundred well-organized supporters, especially if that apparatus is hidebound and complacent. Heck, you might manage to take over both of ‘em. . . .
A BLOG REPORT FROM TODAY’S Chicago Tea Party Rally for Adam Andrezejewski.
UPDATE: Related: Formerly Obama-friendly Republican changes tune: “What I pointed out a couple of years ago was that when the president served in Springfield, he had a record of bipartisanship and I wonder where that bipartisanship is in Washington today.”
IT’S MISERABLY COLD, SINGLE-DIGIT WEATHER IN MICHIGAN, but they had a Tea Party rally anyway. Here’s a report.
MORE ON Lech Walesa at the Chicago Tea Party Rally.
UPDATE: More here.
REPORT AND VIDEO: Lech Walesa At The Chicago Tea Party.
SEIU AND UNIONS RUNNING A false-flag Tea Party operation? “It’s exactly this kind of big-special-interest manipulation that has given rise to the Tea Party movement — and why Big Labor is so ardently trying to kill it off.” And vice versa, of course. . . .
OBAMA WAS IN TAMPA YESTERDAY, and the Tampa Tea Party turned out. More pics and a full report, later.
A NEW AD FOR TEA-PARTY-BACKED ADAM ANDRZEJEWSKI:
LECH WALESA TO APPEAR at Chicago Tea Party.
OBAMA VISITS TAMPA TODAY, and the Tampa Tea Party folks will be there.
A MONEYBOMB for Tea Party-backed Illinois Governor Candidate Adam Andrzejewski. I understand he’ll have Lech Walesa campaigning for him.
UPDATE: Here he is on Fox. (Bumped).
ANOTHER UPDATE: On the Lech Walesa bit, Sean Kinsell writes: “If that’s a joke on his Polish surname, I’m pretty sure a better one would have been that it’s Pat Benatar’s maiden name.” Uh, no. He really will have Lech Walesa campaigning for him.
OBAMA VISITS TAMPA TOMORROW, and the Tampa Tea Party folks will be there.
WOW: 3 in 10 Californians Identify With Tea Party.
Plus this: Poll shows Scott Brown could top Obama in prez run. That’s ridiculous. A guy who’s barely even been elected to the Senate, going to the White House in just a couple of years without accumulating any real experience at the national level? Spare me the absurd speculation. Couldn’t happen.
MICHAEL SILENCE: “Unfortunately, the whole Tea Party thing is victim of the age-old tactic of when you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger. I’m still waiting for the ‘Dog bites Tea Party’ headline.”
UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “One could argue they are now.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Paul Lee writes:
Regarding your link about whether the Tea Party becoming a dominant force in the Republican Party, I offer this suggestion: when giving money to any candidate going forward, make sure you to accompany the cash with a note that says, “Tea Party strings attached to this contribution.”
If enough people do it, politicians will begin to understand that fiscal conservatism isn’t something they can give meaningless lip service to.
Hmm.
ON WEDNESDAY, a Tea Party rally in Jersey City.
SIGNS OF THE TIMES: THE SECRET TO FORD’S SUCCESS. “There hasn’t been any negative reaction. A lot of customers that come in here, they’re tired of all the government bailouts. We’ve gotten calls from people encouraging us and telling us their next vehicle will definitely be a Ford.”
And reader Justin Binik-Thomas of the Cincinnati Tea Party emails:
I received this picture from a member of our West Chester Community Tea Party. This sign is hanging in the West Chester Community (a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio).
Please take note to the sign on the bottom as needed corrections have been made:
1. “Putting America to Work” has been corrected to “Putting America in Debt”
2. A ball and chain has been added to the American Worker (yellow diamond)
Heh.
FROM HOPE AND CHANGE TO THIS, IN THE ECONOMIST: Stop! The size and power of the state is growing, and discontent is on the rise.
America’s most vibrant political force at the moment is the anti-tax tea-party movement. Even in leftish Massachusetts people are worried that Mr Obama’s spending splurge, notably his still-unpassed health-care bill, will send the deficit soaring. In Britain, where elections are usually spending competitions, the contest this year will be fought about where to cut. Even in regions as historically statist as Scandinavia and southern Europe debates are beginning to emerge about the size and effectiveness of government. . . .
The Economist will return to these areas in coming months. All raise different issues; and different countries may need to deal with them in different ways. But one large general point links them: a great battle about the state is brewing. And, as in another influential revolution, the first shot may have been heard in Massachusetts.
Read the whole thing. And I love the illustration . . . .
UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “I think deep down inside the rest of us are beginning to understand how that little fella in the illustration that’s about to get eaten feels. Heretofore it’s been the journalist’s job to level the playing field for him. Now he has to do it himself. That’s why there are tea parties.”
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Will the Tea Party tear itself apart? Some people certainly hope so, but I’m not seeing it. That Tea Party folks could look at Scott Brown and see that while he might not be an example of Tea Party perfection, he was good enough, and well-positioned to kill ObamaCare, bespeaks a lot more political maturity than many were willing to credit Tea Party activists with.
A YEAR AGO IT WAS ALL “HOPE AND CHANGE,” but now it’s Leviathan stirs again.
Today big government is back with a vengeance: not just as a brute fact, but as a vigorous ideology. Britain’s public spending is set to exceed 50% of GDP (see chart 1). America’s financial capital has shifted from New York to Washington, DC, and the government has been trying to extend its control over the health-care industry. Huge state-run companies such as Gazprom and PetroChina are on the march. Nicolas Sarkozy, having run for office as a French Margaret Thatcher, now argues that the main feature of the credit crisis is “the return of the state, the end of the ideology of public powerlessness”.
“The return of the state” is stirring up fiery opposition as well as praise. In America the Republican Party’s anti-government base is more agitated than it has been at any time since the days of the Gingrich revolution in 1994. “Tea-party” protesters have been marching across the country with an amusing assortment of banners and buttons: “Born free, taxed to death” and “God only requires 10%”. On January 19th Scott Brown, a Republican, captured the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by the late Ted Kennedy, America’s most prominent supporter of big-government liberalism. . . .
“The question that we ask today”, said Barack Obama in his inaugural address, “is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.” This is clearly naive: with deficits soaring, nobody can afford to ignore the size of government. Mr Obama’s appeal for pragmatism has some value: conservative attempts to roll back government regulations have led to disaster in the finance industry. But left-wing attempts to defend entitlements and public-sector privileges willy-nilly will condemn the state to collapse under its own weight.
Read the whole thing.
TEA PARTY UPDATE: Quincy Tea Party Event Standing Room Only Success.
READER JOSEPH TRISCARI WRITES: “This appeared in the Friday edition of the Tucson newspaper. Amusingly, the editors were complaining earlier this year about a lack of civility among tea party attendees.”
MORE ON THAT TEA PARTY “CONVENTION” IN NASHVILLE: I had planned to cover it for PJTV, but we’ve exchanged a couple of emails and their lack of interest has been palpable. I wish them well, but I wouldn’t pony up that kind of money to attend myself if I weren’t covering it, and I’m not sure why anyone else would, either.
UPDATE: Okay, I just got an email saying that the Quincy, Illinois crowd has gotten involved. That could totally change my opinion. They rock. Stay tuned.
SAY, DO YOU THINK BARACK OBAMA IS STILL “unaware” of the Tea Party protests? (Thanks to reader Jason Mart for the reminder. Mart writes: “Last April 15th, after taking the day off to protest, I remembered how angry I was to hear that our president was ‘unaware of the tea parties…’ I guess maybe he is aware now.” Heh.)
IF YOU MISSED IT LAST NIGHT, check out my interview with Michael Barone on the Massachusetts election and what’s next. Plus, advice for Tea Party folks.
TAXES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE (CONT’D): Over a Dozen Georgia Lawmakers Failed to File State Tax Returns. Seems like they might be ripe for Tea Party challengers . . . .
NEW YORK POST: TEA TIME:
Besides Sen.-elect Scott Brown, the big winner from Tuesday’s stunning upset victory in Massachusetts is the so-called Tea Party movement — grassroots activism sparked by out-of-control federal spending. Tea Parties popped up around the country last spring, bringing together ordinary folks appalled by the fiscal profligacy on display in Washington. At first, the mainstream media largely ignored the Tea Party gatherings. Then came the laughter and the smarmy epithet, “teabaggers.”
Next, liberals attacked Tea Party-goers as extremists or racists or neo-Nazis. While all this went on, the Tea Party folks kept on organizing.
So far it’s worked out pretty well. . . .
MASSACHUSETTS FALLOUT: Reader Jennifer Clippard reports from the Cincinnati Tea Party’s meeting tonight: “Glenn, We have 106 attending tonight. We doubled our size from previous month’s meetings. It seems that MA’s Senate race has an influence on tonight’s turnout.”
INSTAVISION: I talk with Michael Barone about Scott Brown’s victory, about the future of the Tea Party movement, and about who’s next to face voters’ wrath. Even Barney Frank is looking vulnerable. And note that I’m wearing a brown coat . . . .
UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch writes: “This was very good. But you know the really interesting thing here? The tea party basically told the RNC you will not run Dede What’s her name. In the end, they didn’t. The tea party told the RNC you will support Scott Brown, and in the end they had to. That is very significant, I think. I’m betting that Florida is going to turn out the same way.”
MARY KATHARINE HAM: Press suddenly changing tune on Tea Party Movement. “As of last night, the media have finally started to change their tune on the Tea Party movement. I was shocked to hear Chris Matthews concede that Democrats had not learned to talk to those critical of the administration, to assuage their worries. Perhaps that was partly because their picture of those critics was painted by…Chris Matthews, who called 60-something veterans ‘terrorists,’ and compared peaceful protesters to aspiring Timothy McVeighs. Maybe that had something to do with the lack of engagement.”
SO, BROWN WON. This is big news; while the White House is still in the healthcare bunker, things like Jim Webb’s move for a “suspension” until Brown is seated suggest that Democrats in Congress, being closer to the front lines, have a better idea of what’s really going on. We may still see something called “health care reform,” but it seems much less likely that it’ll be anything like ObamaCare, and if they do somehow ram ObamaCare through they’ll see anger that’ll make the Massachusetts special election look like a cakewalk.
But while Scott Brown could get elected as the anti-Obama figure — and while others will be able to pull that off in the fall — the GOP needs to be sure that it doesn’t just look like it’s lining up for its turn at the trough. Polls show that most Americans want smaller government, even with fewer “services.” Running on a platform that money’s better kept in voters’ own pockets, rather than handed over to special interest logrolling and vote-buying, will work: If it’ll work in Massachusetts, it should work pretty much anywhere. It is a fashionably-gloomy line among some on the right to say that the country’s too far gone in statism and the government-handout parasite culture to support such an approach — but again, if you can make it with this in Massachusetts, you can make it pretty much anywhere.
Of course, what the GOP apparat does is less important nowadays than it was. As I noted before, there’s a whole lot of disintermediation going on here — Scott Brown got money and volunteers via the Internet and the Tea Party movement, to a much greater degree than he got them from the RNC. Smart candidates will realize that, too.
And lies don’t work as well as they used to. Obama promised transparency and pragmatic good government, but delivered closed-door meetings and outrageous special-interest payoffs. This made people angry. If Republicans promise honesty and less-intrusive government, but go back to their old ways, the likelihood that the Tea Party will become a full-fledged third party is much greater. Are the Republicans smart enough to realize this? I don’t know. The Democrats weren’t smart enough to look at Virginia and New Jersey and realize that what they were doing was a mistake that would backfire.
And on the third-party front, the Tea Party enthusiasm for Scott Brown bespeaks considerable pragmatism. Republicans who are seen as sellouts may face third-party challenges — or primary challenges, or both — but support for Brown indicates that people aren’t in a “take your marbles and go home” mode yet. Throwing a monkey-wrench into the ObamaCare works was seen as more important than getting the perfect candidate in, and that was a very wise move. I suspect that we’ll see similar pragmatism between now and November, but the GOP should also remember — as was shown in NY-23 — that making an example to encourage the others can be pragmatic, too.
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey: Don’t Get Cocky.
POLL: Massachusetts Voters Evenly Split On Tea Party Movement. If they’re evenly split in freakin’ Massachusetts, well, then . . . .
UPDATE: We Are All Tea Partiers Now. The people, united, will never be defeated.
BOSTON GLOBE: Coakley has conceded in a call to Scott Brown, according to a Brown aide. AP had just projected Brown as a winner.
So has Massachusetts kicked off another American revolution?
UPDATE: David Boaz: The Brown Revolution. “Around the world over the past decade, longstanding and stultifying power elites have been toppled by what came to be known as the ‘color revolutions’ — notably the Rose Revolution in Georgia, the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, and hopefully the Green Revolution in Iran. Now the political elites in Boston and Washington have been rocked by the Brown Revolution.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “Matthews is on now. Has the ‘tingle up the leg’ become a trickle down the leg?” [LATER: Matthews comments.]
Roll Call: Brown Wins Huge Upset in Massachusetts.
Last year, when I was at CPAC for PJTV, a leading pundit told me (politely) that he thought my interest in the Tea Party movement was silly. I demurred. All I can say is I told you so.
MORE: The Scott Heard ‘Round The World.
Plus, A question for Keith Olbermann. “How do those teabags taste?”
Power Line: Thank you, President Bush. “As I understand the Democratic narrative of today’s election, as explained by Robert Gibbs and others, Scott Brown’s victory is the result of voter anger. That anger, in turn, is the understandable result of President Bush’s policies. Thus, George W. Bush is responsible for the election of Scott Brown. President Obama is just a bystander.”
And reader J.C. Rhoades writes: “So, should the good people of Massachusetts be considered the real Browncoats?” I aim to misbehave.
Reader Clifford Grout comments: “I think they should name Scott Brown’s truck ‘Mary Jo’s Revenge’. Just sayin’.”
STILL MORE: Jim Webb: Suspend Further Votes On Health Care Until Brown Is Seated.
Reader Phil Manhard writes: “I love the smell of tar and feathers in the evening. It smells like…..
Victory!” It’s only metaphorical tar and feathers.
Michael Graham: Who’s next?
For at least five minutes, we stood looking at each other in disbelief. Some people kept looking at the TV looking for confirmation from AP. Could it be true?
Finally it sank in. The cheering began to subside, and then came the cry: “Who’s next?”
Another roar, and then came the names: Kerry, Frank, and loudest of all Gov. Deval Patrick.
These people have had their first taste of political success in a long time. They feel hope again, for the first time in years. And they’re spoilin’ for another brawl in the Bay State.
Good.
Plus, Rush Limbaugh reacts.
Politico: Scott Brown pulls off historic upset.
Harry Reid’s reluctance to seat Senator Brown (R- Mass) – boy, I enjoyed typing that – until “the proper paperwork has been received” seems awfully finicky for a man who famously declared he wanted to bring “twelve million undocumented Americans out of the shadows”.
Why not start by bringing the undocumented Senator out of the shadows? Given the unelected Dems sitting as replacements for Obama and his cabinet appointees, it would demonstrate a particular contempt for the people’s voice to hold up the one guy who fought and won an election to get in there.
Indeed.
PICS FROM THE SCOTT BROWN HOMETOWN RALLY TONIGHT.
UPDATE: Politico: New Poll — Brown Up By 9. Don’t get cocky. The real poll is tomorrow, and for that one you’ve got to show up in person.
Plus this: “Brown holds a 15-point lead among males and crushes Coakley by 41 points among self-described independents, a group that’s been steadily inching away from the Democratic party over the last year due to growing apprehension with government spending, bailouts and health care reform.”
IN NORTH CAROLINA, a challenger for Heath Shuler.
He’s vulnerable, and he’ll probably wish he’d been a bit nicer to the Asheville Tea Party folks. . . .
REPORT: An Anti-ObamaCare Protest in Troy, Michigan.
And reader Martha Philipp writes (well, actually, she wrote last night) from Wisconsin:
I just got back from a tea party in Racine, WI. I am not good at judging numbers but I heard estimates of between 2000 and 3000. It was about 25 degrees and cloudy. The crowd and the speakers were cold but fired up. Massachusetts is carrying the torch but Wisconsin has their back. It was cold enough that I had some trouble with my camera. Here is a shot that turned out.
Just in case you thought all the action was in Massachusetts.
UPDATE: But there’s a lot of action in Massachusetts, too. Synnove Bakke posts on Facebook: “Scott Brown had 6000 volunteers from out of state show!! Atmosphere is amazing and the people are so fired up!!”
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: “The reason for today’s vast discontent, presaged by spontaneous national Tea Party opposition, is not that Obama is too cool or compliant but that he’s too left. It’s not about style; it’s about substance.”
MICHAEL BARONE: Obama’s Rapturous Style vs. Tea Party Substance.
WELL, I HAD PLANNED TO COVER THE TEA PARTY CONVENTION IN NASHVILLE NEXT MONTH FOR PJTV, but nobody’s responded to my emails, and now I hear it’ll be closed to the press. Oh, well. People want to know what I think about this event; so far, not that much. We’ll see.
UPDATE: Okay, I got an email from Judson Phillips who says that Gov. Palin has asked for things to be open to the media, and that they’ll be back in touch with me soon on PJTV coverage. So we’ll see.
A REPORT, WITH VIDEO, FROM THE Tea Party March at the Detroit Auto Show Today. You’ve got to admire folks who are willing to come out in that kind of weather.
UPDATE: More here.
WILLIAM JACOBSON: Nothing To See On January 19, Move Along. “Democrats of Massachusetts, listen up. The special election is all but over. Martha Coakley has won.”
UPDATE: More from Sissy Willis.
TEA PARTY MOVEMENT PLANS Detroit Auto Show Protest.
FOLLOWING IN TRENT LOTT’S FOOTSTEPS: Harry Reid apologizes for “light skinned” remark about Obama.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) apologized today for referring to President Barack Obama as “light skinned” and “with no Negro dialect” in private conversations during the 2008 presidential campaign.
“I deeply regret using such a poor choice of words,” said Reid in a statement. “I sincerely apologize for offending any and all Americans, especially African Americans for my improper comments.”
President Obama said in a statement that he and Reid had spoken about the matter on Saturday afternoon. “I accepted Harry’s apology without question because I’ve known him for years, I’ve seen the passionate leadership he’s shown on issues of social justice and I know what’s in his heart,” said Obama. “As far as I am concerned, the book is closed.”
Also, he needs him for health care. Here’s more coverage from CNN.
Dan Riehl comments: “Thank God Reid isn’t a Republican, or he’d be being savaged as a racist. We all know that’s not true. They aren’t racists. They simply don’t believe blacks can be successful without being helped by a white person. That isn’t racism, silly. It’s compassion, or so we’re told.”
And Robert George is not kind.
UPDATE: “Speaking Stupid All The Time.” I don’t really think Reid will follow too far in Trent Lott’s footsteps, though. Obama wants him to stay — and, I suspect, so do the Republicans . . . .
Meanwhile, on Facebook, Bruce Bartlett posts some other racial statements by Democrats, from his book Wrong On Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Drudge has fun:
Meanwhile, a reader emails: “There went his chance at owning a football team.” Heh.
MORE: Over at Talking Points Memo, where Trent Lott came in for plenty of criticism, reader Brian Torrez notes that there’s currently . . . nothing about Reid’s remarks at all. Well, people blog about what they find interesting and apparently this doesn’t interest ‘em. I’ll note that I was on the Lott story, though . . . . (Bumped).
TEA PARTY UPDATE: Robert Mayer of the Tucson Tea Party, which flooded a City Council meeting a few months back, emails that there’s now a recall campaign. Here’s the website. People are rightly focused on health care and the 2010 Congressional elections, but there are a lot of other bloat-graft-and-incompetence targets scattered throughout every level of government.
A READER EMAILS TO ASK why I haven’t gotten behind Arianna Huffington’s “Move Your Money” campaign. “‘Move Your Money’ is very John Galt, very Tea Party.” Well, maybe. I had meant to post on this a while back, and it slipped through the holiday cracks. I kind of like the idea, and while I doubt it will have as much impact as they suggest, it seems to me that moving money from bailed-out banks to smaller community banks is a good idea — sort of like buying your car from non-bailout car companies.
I’ve got an uncle who’s on the board of a community bank in Georgia, and they’ve done fine — by the simple strategem of making traditional loans to people who can pay them back — and he’s very incensed that they’re in effect being taxed (via higher FDIC premiums and a 3-year prepayment that’s basically a forced loan to the FDIC) to pay for the problems of big banks that did stupid things.
SARAH PALIN TO HEADLINE first-ever Tea Party convention.
CHRIS DODD as a “Tea Party success story.”
SISSY WILLIS: Democrats Leaving A Sinking Ship: The TeaParty Effect?
How worried are Democrats about the mid-term voting only 10 months away? “If the election were held today, we’d lose the House,” Democratic campaign consultant Tom King told the Huffington Post this week, expressing a view that HuffPo says is echoed by a number of Democratic strategists in off-the-record conversations.
Democrats are reportedly busy devising a strategy as a firewall against a citizen revolt at the polls. Rather than emphasize their party’s accomplishments, they will attack Republicans for wanting to restore the discredited Bush era. “The Republican party in Washington today is no different than the Republican party that ran the Congress before,” Rep. Chris Van Hollen, head of the Democratic House campaign committee, told the liberal Talking Points Memo.
Without delay, campaign strategists are advising Democratic clients to use bloggers, phone banks, direct mail and canvassers to try to create a negative impression of their GOP opponents. Labeling their GOP candidates as being part of the Sarah Palin or Tea Party wing of the GOP will be the key element.
Given that the Tea Party is currently outpolling both Democrats and Republicans, this seems ill-advised. . . .
REALLY, THESE PEOPLE ARE PATHETIC: Chris Matthews: Every single “teabagger” in America is white. From the comments: “Every single MSNBC host in America is white.” Heh.
We’ve been over this bogus Tea Party critique before, with photos: “That’s not the moral high ground you’re standing on . . . it’s a big ol’ pile of crap.”
WILL COLLIER has a bone to pick with David Brooks. “What Brooks, with his touching faith in ‘pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise’ doesn’t want to talk about, of course, is just how badly the Ivy League class has failed over the past couple of decades. All those rows of degrees from Harvard didn’t keep a pack of Brooksian elites–mostly members of the Democratic Party–from running Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac straight into the toilet, and taking the private economy with them. Hiring out of the Ivies also didn’t save Lehman Brothers or AIG from doing remarkably stupid things with other people’s money. And as for ‘professional expertise…’ just what profession does the Obama cabinet posses expertise in, other than hardball politics?” And George W. Bush went to Yale and had a graduate degree from Harvard — though, somehow, that didn’t seem to qualify him for membership in the educated classes.
UPDATE: More on Brooks: “Curiously absent from the Brooks column is any sense of what caused all of this. Primarily, it is caused by the real and perceived failures of the educated class, from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol Hill. There has never been much political momentum on the issue of global warming (the Senate pre-emptively rejected the Kyoto treaty on a 95-0 vote) because of economic concerns. Thus, it is not surprising that the public becomes less interested in such action amid a serious recession. If the public has become more pro-life, it may be that the now commonplace technology of sonography has graphically brought the reality of the issue into more and more families, while the supposedly educated class adheres to old dogma. If the public is more concerned about their Second Amendment rights, it may be a reaction to the fact the party in power tends to infringe on them. Indeed, the public reaction on all of these issues may be seen as a reaction against an agenda that lacks a mandate (more on that below).”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, I went and reread that Brooks column. When I posted a link this morning, I didn’t see it as being as objectionable as these responses suggest, and on rereading I still don’t. Yes, there’s the air of Brooksian condescenscion toward the great unwashed, but that’s practically required for the NYT columnist gig, and remember, he’s trying to explain this stuff to the Upper West Side crowd. And I’m not so sure he’s using “educated class” in a positive way. See, e.g., “The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class. They believe big government, big business, big media and the affluent professionals are merging to form self-serving oligarchy — with bloated government, unsustainable deficits, high taxes and intrusive regulation.” So cut Brooks at least a little slack, here.
And reader David Marcus writes: “When Brooks refers to the educated class, which your other commentators equated with Ivy League, I think he really is referring to the New Class as set out by Herman Kahn in the late 1970’s.” Yes, the New Class idea originally appeared as a critique of the Soviet nomenklatura apparatchiks by Milovan Djilas, but Kahn noted that it applies elsewhere, too. I believe that John Kenneth Galbraith noted this, too, only with approval.
MORE: Prof. Kenneth Anderson writes:
New Class analysis needs to be reset into an American context – once place that does that is the great social theory journal Telos. And I try to do that in a law review essay on lawyers, therapeutic authoritarianism, and the New Class, in the Columbia Law Review.
Here’s a bit from the conclusion:
The old elites wanted to be the top of the communities in which they had grown up; whether to lead or dominate, to serve communities or exploit them, at least they understood themselves as having a place in them. The new elites, by contrast, want no connection; they understand that power is elsewhere, money is elsewhere, and mobility is everything; if indeed they have to live somewhere, it will be if at all possible in a wholly private, gated community. Yet simultaneously they want to dominate.
The New Class pushes its mobility to absolute limits, launching itself into what it imagines is a global society conducted in the jet stream, made weightless by the complete mobility of capital, but with devastating consequences for those left behind on the ground. For those who cannot fly, there is first, the administration of life by these same elites and their hirelings, the authoritarian, bureaucratic formations which, to be sure, express themselves alternately in soothingly therapeutic psycho-babble or communitarian slogans of the common good or assertions of new and endless rights and, second, economic insecurity in the midst of being urged to greater self-esteem …
In this unforgiving light, the unhappiness of lawyers looks rather less like professionals experiencing the loss of fulfillment that accompanies losing “ownership” of the social ends of the legal profession and rather more like the unhappiness of experts who, having established to their own satisfaction the certainty of ends not open for argument by non-experts, wonder why they are not also loved.
The issue of the New Class and its lawyers is authoritarianism. In an age when the therapeutic has appropriated rights talk, and with it lawyers, turning it and them into agents of New Class authoritarianism and social control, the real question that needs to be answered is why there exists the continued “hegemony within the public culture of an essentially indeterminate and at the same time absolutist discourse of rights.” It predominates because, far from being merely a language of individual liberty or even unbridled individual license (as, for example, the communitarians would have us believe) it is today a language of state authority, a language of therapeutic paternalism; those who actually dream of being “liberals” will not reclaim rights talk any time soon. Its appropriation is at the core of the process by which the state today controls, as Christopher Lasch wrote, “not merely [the individual's] . . . outer but his inner life as well; not merely the public realm but the darkest corners of private life, formerly inaccessible to political domination.”
Lawyers are deeply complicit in this colonization of the language of rights by the culture of therapy. They participate because it serves the agenda of a class that, unfamiliar with democracy except as an impediment to its social engineering, is incapable of any form of discourse that is not directed from the top to the bottom. Expertise, particularly in the social sciences, is a language of hierarchy and social control, and lawyers today, as a professional formation within the New Class, deploy the language of rights to the end of making the therapeutic coercive in the public sphere.
It is not a glorious profession because it is not a glorious class, and lawyers are right to be unhappy.
Gosh, I feel kinda guilty for enjoying life so much now.
RELATED: Bad sociology.
MORE: Reader Joe Jackson writes: “You’ve probably already posted all of the give and take that you intend to post concerning the David Brooks column. But I can’t resist relating this: Back in the early 90s someone gave me an autobiography by Ben Bradlee. It was a lousy book, poorly written, in fact an embarrassment. But one little anecdote has stayed with me. When he first arrived at the Washington Post, retired Executive Editor Leonard Downie’s nickname, according to Bradlee, was ‘Land Grant Len’. Seems that Downie, unlike most of the other hot-shots at the Post, including Bradlee himself, was not an Ivy Leaguer but rather a graduate of Ohio State, a Land Grant institution. David Brooks fits right into this mind-set.”
DAVID BROOKS: “The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year. . . . A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.”
