Let’s try a little thought experiment.
Pretend you’re the Democratic Party. You’ve controlled both houses of Congress since 2007 and the White House since 2009. You came to power during a recession which, most voters agree, you only made worse. You also inherited a budget with a huge deficit, and you made that worse, too. You rammed through an unpopular stimulus package that paid off your political supporters but did nothing to improve the economy, and an even more unpopular health care package that will make us all pay more for health care while giving us less of it. Despite overwhelming voter demand to do something about illegal immigration, you refuse to secure the border, and when a state acted to do what the Federal government won’t do, you sued.
You can’t run on this record. Six in ten Americans no longer trust you to govern, and an even larger number think you’re taking the country in the wrong direction.
So what do you do? You change the subject, that’s what you do.
This is the only way to understand why the Left and their media allies have been heaping so much abuse on the Tea Party movement. When citizens gather in huge rallies around the country to protest out-of-control government spending, then just accuse them of RACISM!
Unfortunately, this tactic seems to be working.
The Left and its media allies have maintained a drumbeat of slanderous accusations of racism against the Tea Party movement almost since it started more than a year ago. This drumbeat reached a crescendo in March following a Tea Party demonstration on the Capitol grounds against Obamacare when a member of the Congressional Black Caucus claimed he heard racial epithets shouted at members of the caucus as they made their way through the crowd, and another member supposedly was spit on.
No video or audio evidence has been presented to prove these alleged incidents actually happened, despite a standing offer by libertarian blogger Andrew Breitbart to donate $100,000 to the United Negro College Fund on behalf of anyone who is able to produce such evidence. This didn’t stop the establishment media from reporting these unproven allegations as fact. (Says Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center: “let’s stop calling them ‘unproven allegations.’ Let’s call them what they are: lies.”)
It also didn’t stop the NAACP last week from citing these made-up incidents in their “unanimous” resolution condemning the Tea Party for not confronting the “racist elements” in its ranks.
According to Mary Frances Berry, former chair of the U. S. Civil Rights Commission,
Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.
And this is precisely the effect the bogus racism charges have had. Late last week, Mark Williams, a talk radio host who serves as a spokesman for Tea 
Party Express, took the NAACP’s bait and posted a racially offensive letter on his web site. The “letter” was actually intended to be satire. It was addressed to President Abraham Lincoln from “Colored” people, and accused him of racism for setting them free and making them responsible for their own lives. Critics have called the letter “racist”, but I think “racially insensitive” is a better description.
I understand the point Williams was trying to make — that the Democratic Party and its NAACP allies support a bloated welfare state that has kept many African Americans in a dependent class as slavery once did. But the “letter” was stupid and in extremely poor taste. Williams quickly took it down, but the damage had been done.
The result of this is that Tea Partiers are now fighting among themselves, and some candidates have rejected Tea Party endorsements. The National Tea Party Federation, a sort-of umbrella group of 61 Tea Party organizations across the country, expelled Williams and the Tea Party Express. Even this, however, was not enough for MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “Reach over, grab the [racist] sign and tear it out of the guy’s hands, then I’ll believe you,” said Matthews. Oh, so the only way Tea Partiers can satisfy Chris Matthews is to commit assault and battery.
So, now the Left has the Tea Party arranged in a circular firing squad shooting at each other and arguing about racism instead of focusing on getting the big taxers and spenders out of Congress.
The demand that the Tea Party purge its alleged “racist fringe” is disingenuous, anyway. It is not an organized movement. Tea Party rallies are big, public affairs held in big, public spaces. Anybody can come, and anybody can carry any kind of sign he wants. That’s their First Amendment right. The demand that the Tea Party purge its ranks is just a way of changing the subject so that, instead of protesting the uncontrolled growth of government, its members waste their time trying to prove they’re not racists.
My guess is that the Democrats WILL run on their record because it is far better than the record the Republicans and the Tea Partiers have to run on (none).
You claim the stimulus was a failure, yet many economists have insisted that the stimulus brought about the end of the recession and would have been more effective if it had been even larger. They contend that the only way out of a recession is for the country to spend its way out, and with the financial institutions not willing to lend, the only source of capital is the federal government. Those economists believe deficit spending is acceptable and even essential in the short term in order to keep the recovery from stalling out.
As for the healthcare package, time will tell how well it is received by the public… most of its provisions haven’t even gone into effect yet. But for those people who couldn’t afford or couldn’t get health insurance coverage, it will be a life-saver. And for those on Medicare, they still have their Medicare, so they aren’t going to fuss too much. This is not going to be the damning issue you think it is.
Regarding illegal immigration, what do the Republicans or the Tea Partiers have to offer? Arizona’s new law does nothing to secure the border, so how is it doing anything to solve the problem? Even if the state law is not found to be unconstitutional, it will have little to no effect on the problem. Therefore, this also will not hurt the Democrats.
As for he charges of racism among the Tea Partiers, who have they got to blame besides themselves? The Democrats certainly didn’t plant that incredibly offensive letter on Mark Williams’s website. What was he thinking? You can “spin” it all you want by claiming it was intended to be satire, but clearly it crossed the line in talking about a highly-charged subject in an inflammatory way. Besides, how do you know what Williams was thinking when he wrote it? Maybe he is a racist.
Despite the lingering charges of racism, the 2010 and 2012 elections will be decided by one issue only: the economy. Because unemployment is high and the economy is still sluggish, the Republicans will likely make inroads in 2010. Some Tea Partiers may even get elected. But, if the economy starts to pick up and the unemployment numbers start coming down before the 2012 elections, the Democrats will get the credit for it and the Republicans and Tea Partiers will get nada because they haven’t contributed anything. Under those circumstances, look for Obama to be re-elected.
Oh, which economists said THAT? Got news for you: the recession hasn’t ended, not with an unemployment rate of around ten percent.
Yeah, they have their Medicare. They just don’t have as many doctors to go to. Doctors are dropping Medicare patients, and those who still take them have waiting lists.
Oh, so now one has to prove he is NOT a racist or else be called one? BTW, I did not “spin” anything. I reported on the “letter”, and I said it was stupid and in poor taste. Stupid is not evil.
Unfortunately the “Tea Party” hasn’t really done a good job of communicating what principles they actually stand for. That makes it harder to deny any accusations (racism or otherwise.) They have also been co-opted to a large degree by the current Republican establishment, further muddying the waters.
The only consistent thing they seem to stand for is “lower government spending” but even that is not entirely accurate as they support increased military funding and health care funding (just not “socialist” health care.)
Until the Tea Party actually has a defined identity they’re going to continue suffering these kind of attacks.
Re: “Oh, which economists said THAT? Got news for you: the recession
hasn’t ended, not with an unemployment rate of around ten percent.”
Paul Krugman for one. And there are others who share his view that the economy is on the road to recovery. Unemployment will always be the last element of an economy to reflect a recovery. The very last thing businesses do when they have suffered through a downturn is start expanding. It could be a decade before unemployment returns to an acceptable level.
Re: “Yeah, they have their Medicare. They just don’t have as many doctors
to go to. Doctors are dropping Medicare patients, and those who still
take them have waiting lists.”
The healthcare reform legislation has nothing to do with the shortage of doctors or the refusal of doctors to accept new Medicare patients. Most provisions of the bill don’t go into effect for a few more years. The problem goes back more than a decade when congress passed legislation to ensure that annual Medicare payments did not exceed a pre-determined sustainable growth rate (SGR). If they did, the law required that they be automatically reduced the next year by an amount equivalent to the amount they exceeded the SGR by in order to keep payments on track with the SGR. The problem is that annual Medicare payments have exceeded the SGR almost every year since the legislation passed, and the SGR gap has risen to 21%. The “Doc Fix” bill with funding to cover the gap for the next 6 months was passed and signed by the president last month, but a permanent fix that resets and re-calibrates the SGR curve is needed. I don’t believe the healthcare reform bill, as enacted, adequately funds the necessary correction, and that is one of its many flaws. Of course, the fact that annual Medicare costs have exceeded the SGR with regularity goes to illustrate how fast the cost of medical care has been rising in this country.
Re: “Oh, so now one has to prove he is NOT a racist or else be called
one? BTW, I did not “spin” anything. I reported on the “letter”, and I
said it was stupid and in poor taste. Stupid is not evil.”
Do you really believe Williams’s letter was an innocent attempt at satire without any racist overtones whatsoever? Now that’s spin! The letter conveyed his personal views that blacks are lazy, inferior to whites, and would rather live on welfare than work for a living. And since he is not talking about a specific individual but rather an ethnic group as a whole, that’s racism.