Day: September 26, 2011

How Quickly Tea Partiers Forget

Trish

It becomes plain quite quickly that history serves these people as religion does — not a complicated interaction of complicated people, but as a glossary of shibboleths, of fundamentalist code words…

They are deaf to the ironies of even their own personal histories. Rick Perry was in the Air Force. Herman Cain did ballistics analysis for the Navy. Jon Huntsman has worked government jobs for 20 years, and Mitt Romney’s father was governor of Michigan. Rick Scott proudly admits he grew up in public housing, and Paul Ryan got through high school and college on Social Security survivor’s benefits. And this is how they all came to become small-government conservatives who didn’t need a hand-out.

— Charles P. Pierce, in his Esquire column, addressing the tea party’s fondness for cherry picking quotes and intentions from the founders

Ask Dr. Democrat — Can We Have a Viable Third Party?

Dr. Democrat

doctordemocratDear Dr. Democrat:

The Republican Tea Party scares me. I worry that the Democrats won’t be energized enough to re-elect Obama. Could there be a third way? I’ve heard of this group, Americans Elect, that’s trying to nominate a centrist candidate over the Internet. Do you think that’s possible?

— Worried in Weehawken

Dear Worried:

Movements like Americans Elect are just sad. These people have to know that our system has calcified in a way that prevents the birth of “third parties” — even the fact that we call them “third parties” out of habit is an indicator of this. A healthy political system could sustain multiple parties, not just two or three.

There are only two known ways a new national party can form and become powerful enough to win the presidency: 1) Replace an existing party, as happened in the 1850s when the Republicans replaced the Whigs, or 2) rise up like a brush fire out in the districts, a real grass-roots movement (to mix metaphors, sort of) that starts in local elections, rises up through the state legislatures, governorships and then into Congress. That’s a generational project that has never actually happened before.

Americans Elect and their ilk are seeking a messiah, a post-partisan George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Jesus all rolled into one who is capable of leading us into a promised land of world peace bipartisanship, where the parties govern without all this rancor and bickering. (This has also never actually happened before.)

[…]

Obama: Elect a Republican President at Your Children’s Peril

Buck Banks

The alternative I think is an approach to government that would fundamentally cripple America in meeting the challenges of the 21st Century and that’s not the kind of society that I want to bequeath to Malia and Sasha, and your children and your grandchildren.

— President Obama, quoted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, saying that electing a Republican president in 2012 “would deeply hurt the country.”

Tea Party Giving Romney Another Look

Buck Banks

Romney has an opportunity to rehabilitate himself… What Tea Partiers are looking for is someone that stands for something, but also someone that shows the political skills to win. It’s not enough to be right and lose. The goal here is to win the presidency.

— Matt Kibbe, chairman and CEO of the national Tea Party group FreedomWorks, which has begun to soften its earlier opposition to Mitt Romney as Rick Perry has faltered in recent debates, reports the Huffington Post.