Except for those who voted for Obama because he wasn’t Bush, and those who voted for Obama because they wanted “change”, and those who voted for Obama because he was black and it was “time” for a black president, and those who wanted us out of Gitmo, and those who wanted us out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and those who wanted “Don’t ask, don’t tell” to be overturned, and those who wanted transparency in government and who believed that bills before Congress would be posted online 48 hours before they were to be voted on, and those who…well, you get the idea.
So you take all that away and then you’re left with the people who voted for Obama but had no idea that a virtual takeover of Wall Street and the automobile industry would take place, that the largest pork bill of all time would be passed under the guise of an economic stimulous package, and that they would be forced by law to carry and pay for health insurance.
People aren’t unhappy and in a throw-the-bastards-out mood because Obama’s promises are being kept, but because of the arrogant and defiant way he and Congress have behaved since the got the keys to the country’s car. It’s very telling when you have the Speaker of the House of Representatives urging its members to vote in a way contrary to what their contituencies want, even if they get kicked out Congress for doing so. We have a representative government in which our representatives are supposed to do our bidding rather than knowingly defying it, which is exactly what’s happened.
Given my disdain for cite contests I don’t suppose I’m in a very good position to ask for a cite on that.
But however you cut it, you still have a representative body deliberately taking action that they know full well could cause the voters in their district to boot them from office. That is not the way representative governments are supposed to work.
And still the overarching point of the paragraph of mine that you quoted was that the country’s fed up with the things Congress and Obama have done since the election and the overall direction in which the country is heading. The county’s voters aren’t in a throw the bastards out mood because the health care bill didn’t go far enough.
And I suppose that the many black leaders in the conservative and tea party movements are all Uncle Toms? Are those clever Tea Partiers tricking all these black people into joining so they can hide their racism which you see so clearly?
Problems with the thesis that this is about race:
As Starving Artist pointed out, Clinton got a lot of opposition too.
Obama was elected with nearly a 70% approval rating. It’s now down to 43% So were those 27% of Americans ‘born again’ racists? Or were they masking their racism when they cheered for his election? Or what?
Conservatives have always welcomed black people in their ranks, and there are Black conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, and (at one time) Colin Powell who were held in very high esteem by conservatives. The head of the RNC is black.
There’s very little evidence of any systemic racism in the Tea Party movement. Of course there are individual racists. Probably thousands of them. Just as there are in the Democrat party. Just because the Reverend Wright and Louis Farrakhan are racists doesn’t mean Democrats are motivated by racism.
I take accusations of racism with a grain of salt because Democrats have very openly said that they were going to use charges of racism against the Tea Party for political purposes. On the JounoList listserv, they openly discussed the idea of simply accusing a random Republican leader of racism. The National Black Caucus tried to create a racist incident at a tea party rally, failed, then one of them simply lied and said it happened - and the media reported it as fact. In the meantime, the beating of a black Tea Party members by SEIU union members, done while hurtling racial epithets at him, was downplayed. And CNN displayed a photo of a tea party member with a gun, saying that it was sign that the white people in the tea party were becoming violent. But they cropped the photo to avoid showing that the man with a gun was a black member of the Tea Party. Didn’t fit the narrative.
When a member of one of the larger tea party groups wrote a piece that had what appeared to be racist sentiment, the Tea Party people drummed him out. I’ve never seen the left really have a problem with Robert Byrd, or Louis Farrakhan, or Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton, or Maxine Waters, or any number of other prominent Democrats who have uttered racist comments. And in my experience, the left tolerates a lot of anti-semitism.
And of course, it’s also racist to criticize the tea party based on the color of their skin. When you say that 88% of the tea party is white, as if this is suggestive of racism or stupidity or obviously negative, you’re uttering racist thoughts.
When I read that 88% of the Tea Party was white, my first thought was that this was probably a fairly good demographic representation for blacks, given that the tea party is a largely midwestern, suburban and rural movement. My second thought was that if they got 12% of black people to join them, that’s pretty good since Obama got 96% of the black vote. So 12% is certainly not any evidence of a movement hostile to black people or excluding black people from their ranks.
The “powerful” Grass roots movement’ was largely financed and pushed by wealthy right wingers and conservative Tv and radio stations. They got press that far outstripped their significance. At this point we don’t know if it is a group that will actually vote in bloc or if they ill splinter at the polls. If they line up for politicians like Angle or Palin,they will regret it.
You are pretty much describing yourself. The Democrats at the time were the ones taking the conservative position of maintaining slavery; a position that’s conservative even by your definition. The Democrats and Republicans have - rather famously - switched sides in regards to social justice since then. Pointing to what the Republicans were like a century and a half ago in order to claim that they aren’t heavily racist now is an act of, at best, extreme cluelessness. And hypocritical to use as a defense of conservatism, given your own definition of conservatism.
Apparently, Starving, you have decided to stop flirting with inconsistency and fling yourself headlong into incoherence. You claim the majority party is defying the expressed will of the voters by advancing an agenda they had run upon, and won. But apparently the party who insists on filibustering and obstructing that very same voter-approved agenda…they are acting in accord with the will of the people.
How is that will expressed other than by election? Have you divined the will of the people by some other means? Examing entrails for omens?
I can understand your stated disdain for “cite contests”, in the same way I understand Steve Hawking declining to participate in a rhumba contest. But given your antipathy for citation, have you any other means of substantiating your thesis, other than insisting that we revere and respect the Gospel According to St. Arving?
As the great Frank Luntz has taught us, surveys trump elections. Especially ones that conflate left-wing and right-wing reasons for discontent into one big bad ball of boo(-urns).
Hey, if gay rights activists care so much about gay marriage, why aren’t they picketing Obama like they did Bush?
If the anti-war movement wants out of Afghanistan so badly, how come we aren’t seeing 100,000 people marching on Washington like they did against Bush?
If the Guantanamo Bay opponents dislike Guantanamo bay so much, how come they aren’t foaming at the mouth and screaming at Obama about it?
I think you know the answer. When it’s your own guy in power, or you perceive the alternative to your own, admittedly imperfect president to be significantly worse, you swallow your ideology a bit for the good of the larger cause. This is human nature, and it happens in every administration. It was Bill Clinton who signed the Defense of Marriage Act, but the gay movement remained relatively silent until a Republican was in office. Some of it is political theater, and some of it is a cold political calculation that your guy, warts and all, is better than the other one so you don’t want to bring him down even if in some cases he’s acting against your own interests.
Then there’s partisanship. Some people just reflexively defend ‘their’ guy, and reflexively oppose the other. It’s human nature. It’s tribalism writ large in a modern political context.
However, that said, there was a LOT of grumbling on the right about the Bush administration. They almost went into revolt over the Harriet Miers nomination. They fought back so strongly against Bush’s Steel tariffs that he had to rescind them. And in the end, he had only 34% popularity, and Obama was elected with an almost 70% approval rating. That means Bush lost all the independents who have subsequently joined the Tea Party, and he also lost most Republicans other than the Christian Coalition types. He remained popular among social conservatives and that’s about it.
Are you under the impression that all those people are happy with Obama? These are people who, among other insults, call him “Bush in blackface”. He’s been getting slammed by gay rights advocates ever since the inauguration, where he invited an anti-gay speaker - he couldn’t even wait until getting into office before betraying them.
Yeah, you’re right. Sometimes from Canada American the American racial divide looks pretty bimodal. So let’s see what Gallup says about the makeup of the Tea Party:
Bolding mine. This is the composition Gallup found:
Non-Hispanic white - the Tea Party: 79%. All adults: 75%
Non-Hispanic black - the tea party: 6%. All adults: 11%
Given the fact that blacks are most clustered in the cities and in the south and on the coasts, while the Tea Party is more ‘middle America’ and suburban/rural, it sounds to me like it’s got pretty good minority representation.
In addition, its age breakdown almost exactly matches the American demographic pattern. It’s not a bunch of old people. And while it’s got more Republicans in it than the public at large, the majority of tea partiers are not members of the Republican party. Registered independents make up 43% of the Tea Party, and registered Democrats make up 8% of the Tea Party. For an avowedly libertarian/conservative movement, I’d say that’s pretty damned inclusive.
This portrayal of the tea party as a bunch of ultra-conservative, racist rednecks just doesn’t fly. But I know it’s the left’s narrative and their weapon going into the next election, so I don’t expect any of you to agree with me. It’s too important to continue demonizing your opposition.
Oh, and by the way - Glenn Beck came out in favor of gay marriage. Isn’t he one of the leaders of the homophobic, social conservative tea party?
I’m sure *someone *benefits from the continuous repetition of this spin on the origin and motivations of the Tea Party, but damned if I can tell who it is.
The Right knows it’s bullshit, the members themselves know it’s bullshit (though a scant few who retain a residue of conscience may earnestly *wish *it were true, in order to feel better about themselves), and the Left DAMN sure knows it’s bullshit… so who’s left that you’re trying desperately to convince?
That is no more relevant today than the fact that the GOP is the Party of Lincoln, i.e., not at all. Neither party is what it was in 1865. Neither party is what it was in 1960. And this thread is about conservatives, not Republicans – in fact, it is in particular about conservatives who have broken with what they perceive as the GOP establishment.
Not bailing out the government. They are bailing out the bankers and financial pros. What party do you think they are members of? So the bailout is for republican rich thieves who over cooked their looting.
The Moral Majority is often credited with winning the 1980 election for Ronald Reagan. In 1976 most white Southern Protestant Fundamentalists in the South who voted, voted for Jimmy Carter. Nationally, a very large percentage of white Protestant Fundamentalists did not vote, considering politics a dirty business, as they passively waited for the second coming of Christ.
Jerry Falwell convinced most of those people that politics did matter, and that they should vote for a divorced man who spent his formative years in Hollywood, and who rarely attended church, rather than a born again Christian who clearly took his faith seriously.
According to the most recent Gallup Survey, 42% of Americans consider themselves to be conservatives, and 22% consider themselves to be liberals. In 2008 that was 37% conservative, and 22% liberal. In 2006 it was 37% conservative to 21% liberal. Since 1992 conservatives in the United States have outnumbered liberals by a considerable margin.
The Democrats did not do well during the elections of 2006 and 2008 because the American people moved to the left, but because George W. Bush started two expensive wars he could not win, and because most Americans did not benefit from the Bush economy. Indeed, “Commerce Department data released today show that the share of national income going to wages and salaries in 2006 was at its lowest level on record with data going back to 1929.”
Barack Obama did not have a mandate to expand the public sector of the economy with an ambitious health care plan. He had two assignments: restore the good economic numbers of Clinton’s last term, and achieve stressful conclusions to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If he had achieved both of those goals he would have earned the political capital to move ahead on health care. Because unemployment has continued to grow since Obama’s inauguration, he has reinforced the suspicions of conservatives who voted for him, that the government cannot do any thing right.
By contrast, after Franklin Roosevelt was in office for two years the unemployment rate declined from 23.6% in 1932 to 21.7% in 1934.
Consequently, the Democrats gained nine seats in the Senate, and nine seats in the House. This gave Roosevelt the power to move on the durable aspects of the New Deal, like Social Security.
An additional factor benefiting the Tea Party movement is that there is a feeling that economic growth is no longer possible, and that gains by one group mean loses for another group. This makes disputes over economic issues more bitter. Many in the Tea Party movement lost ground economically during the Bush administration. Nevertheless, the number of people with jobs and private health plans greatly outnumbers the number of people who lack both.
Since the end of the draft in 1973 the Left in the United States has not had issues it could use to appeal to the self interest of the well educated. In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s the great majority of male college students at elite colleges and universities did not want to fight in Vietnam, because they knew they had much to live for. Their girl friends and parents agree with them.
Elite centers of higher learning may have faculties that are to the left of center, and they sway many of their students. Nevertheless, it is difficult to feel very angry at American capitalism, when one knows that it will amply reward one after graduation. This is even true during our economic down turn.
On the other hand, since 1973 the right has been able to appeal to lower income whites who are alienated by social changes that have happened since the 1960’s.
For these two reasons, there has been quite a lot more energy on the right than on the left since 1980.
