Good Legs Won’t Be Enough To Lead This Tea Party

Can a party that bills itself a Tea Party ever be taken seriously? Clearly they are trying to… in Tennessee this weekend not an Obama-face-wearing-Hitler-moustache in sight. Only Sarah Palin’s trademark red jacket and her trademark face, hair, stockings, smile, ill-informed demeanor and platitudes… such as the one where she calls the deficit in President Obama’s 2011 budget “immoral,” amounting to “generational theft.” Clearly her memory is short. Or perhaps it’s as we all really know—this woman, this pop culture icon, wanna-be political leader—is just not the brightest bulb on the tree. Because the deficit that’s immoral and stealing from our kids? Obama is not the cause. Palin needs to look a little further back and let the right people take the rap. Here Sarah, read this from the New York Times in June 2009, a very good (and layperson-friendly!) introduction to responsibility for the deficit:

The story of today’s deficits starts in January 2001, as President Bill Clinton was leaving office. The Congressional Budget Office estimated then that the government would run an average annual surplus of more than $800 billion a year from 2009 to 2012. Today, the government is expected to run a $1.2 trillion annual deficit in those years.

You can think of that roughly $2 trillion swing as coming from four broad categories: the business cycle, President George W. Bush’s policies, policies from the Bush years that are scheduled to expire but that Mr. Obama has chosen to extend, and new policies proposed by Mr. Obama.

The first category — the business cycle — accounts for 37 percent of the $2 trillion swing. It’s a reflection of the fact that both the 2001 recession and the current one reduced tax revenue, required more spending on safety-net programs and changed economists’ assumptions about how much in taxes the government would collect in future years.

About 33 percent of the swing stems from new legislation signed by Mr. Bush. That legislation, like his tax cuts and the Medicae prescription drug benefit, not only continue to cost the government but have also increased interest payments on the national debt.

Mr. Obama’s main contribution to the deficit is his extension of several Bush policies, like the Iraq war and tax cuts for households making less than $250,000. Such policies — together with the Wall Street bailout, which was signed by Mr. Bush and supported by Mr. Obama — account for 20 percent of the swing.

About 7 percent comes from the stimulus bill that Mr. Obama signed in February. And only 3 percent comes from Mr. Obama’s agenda on health care, education, energy and other areas.

The Tea Party’s biggest issues seem to be  discontent over the bailout and the fact that the administration wants everyone in the country to have access to decent healthcare. Apparently these issues make the Tea Party fringe. Not exactly left of center — but maybe right of center.  Pehaps they will soon adopt the “Yes We Can” motto, to solidify their outsider status.

The Tea Party is desperate for legitimacy and to that end, kicked all the crazies out of its convention in Nashville. See this from today’s New York Times:

Organizers said that anyone “looking too crazy” would have been tossed out. They had a goal that turned out to be shared by pretty much everyone here: to turn the Tea Party into a serious political force, rather than the angry fringe group they say it had been branded as.

“The movement is maturing,” said Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, the social networking site that sponsored the convention. “The rallies were good for last year, because that’s what we could do last year. This year we have to change things. We have got to win.”

Those in attendance reportedly paid between $349-$549 to see Palin speak, and the Times story said it had been reported her fee may have been $100,000. If she aspires to lead the Tea Party, she shouldn’t have to be paid to do it. And how can she be taken seriously when this is the photo that ran with that Times’ story:

She looks like a contestant on The Dating Game, not someone vying to be a potential third-party presidential candidate. And she’s going to need more than good legs to do that.  In fact the whole thing feels like, more than anything else, this of-the-moment crusade, a point in history when older, middle-Americans are unhappy and feel cheated, and want to blame someone…. why not the powers that be? Why not Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Barack Obama? But is vague discontent and a lack of intellectual clarity enough to turn this group into a viable third party, with a viable candidate?

As the Wall Street Journal reported today:

Building a coherent movement isn’t going to be easy. The Tea Party activism that sprung up in early 2009 remains a largely undefined and loosely organized concept, prone to infighting among activists over its leadership and ties to the Republican Party. It is guided by thousands of independent and conservative activists nationally who organize mainly through online social networking sites.

The Nashville gathering has been the target of criticism from competing Tea Party activists in Tennessee and elsewhere who questioned the spirit of Mr. [Judson] Phillips’ [the Nashville lawyer who organized the National Tea Party convention this weekend] decision to turn his outfit, Tea Party Nation, into a for-profit corporation and charge the 600 attendees $600 for the three-day convention. The meeting included sessions on political organizing and a keynote address from former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

And one has to ask themselves if the whole thing is kind of a joke…the fact that the Tea Party has no specific platform, but only a common belief that politicians in both parties basically stink. Details to come later, I guess. The WSJ also reported that Tea Party-ists believe “the concept of American exceptionalism is faltering.” But what is “American exceptionalism?” Were we exceptional for the eight years before Obama took office? Exceptional, perhaps, for waging war without cause, polluting the world without care, turning a blind eye to women’s rights, gay rights?

American exceptionalism, says Howard Zinn, the author of “A People’s History of the United States,”  is a notion of superiority, one that began when Governor Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony described establishing “a city on a hill” to serve the world as a beacon of liberty. American exceptionalism says “nation building” to me; it’s scary — it speaks of an entitlement we feel to spread our brand of civilization, politics, commercialism and religion to the rest of the world. And if that’s faltering…well so be it.