Tea party starting to have effect?

[Gob]

Tea Party ousts Utah Republican

The conservative Tea Party movement in the US has blocked a three-term Republican senator from Utah, Bob Bennett, in his bid for re-election.

Sen Bennett came third at a Republican Party convention in Salt Lake City.

The two challengers, one backed by the Tea Party, will face each other in a primary next month for the right to contest November's Midterm elections.

It is the first major victory for the grassroots movement that objects to big government and opposes high spending.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8670544.stm

[tyro]

Pointless aside alert:

Consider this phrase:

It is the first major victory for the grassroots movement that objects to big government and opposes high spending.

Notice that both planks in their party platform are negative objectives. They don’t say that they favour smaller government and reduced spending. They simply object (ok, it’s the reporter choosing these words) to big government and oppose high spending.

The psychology of this way to describe one’s position is more powerful to a listener and yet less meaningful.

There is nothing in that descriptions that promises a smaller government or that spending will be reduced.

[Sue U]

In fact, tyro, it's just plain stupid. No U.S. politician has ever campaigned on a platform of "bigger government and higher spending." Moreover, I can pretty much guarantee that the ideas of "less government and less spending" that I favor are not the same ones embraced by the teabaggers.

These are simple people looking for simple solutions to very complex and very large problems. But mindless sloganeering is not a very good way to craft effective public policy.

[Gob]

Soundbite politics, the curse of modern political life.

Better to have a neat catchphrase, such as; "change", "hope", "less spending", "building the economy", than any debatable policy.

[rubato]

The Tea Party = Letting the most stupid people in the country drive policy.

yrs,
rubato

[Gob]

It is an upstart, outsider image that Mr Paul is only too happy to cultivate.

"I upset the apple cart," he told the BBC outside Malone's steakhouse in Lexington.

"I don't run to become part of the system. I want to help the Republican Party regain its believability as fiscal conservatives."

With his low-tax, small-government, economically libertarian views, Mr Paul has attracted fierce support from the conservative Tea Party movement activists whose disenchantment with Washington has already been felt in several races across the country.

His call for term limits for US senators appeals to Mica Simms, a local organiser in Lexington.

"We don't need more career politicians," she said with passion, adding that they are not what the Founding Fathers intended.

"Politicians are supposed to ride up in their horse and buggy, go serve the country and come home," Ms Simms insisted. "Now they stay up in Washington and they're so disconnected."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8684618.stm

[Sue U]

I don't know if you heard about the GEICO voice-over actor who was fired for leaving a sarcastic voicemail with a Tea Party funding organization last month. But he's back with a new message, this time for would-be critics of loony wingnut groups and their sponsors: Don't Drunk Dial FreedomWorks! (Don't Do It!) (Really, Don't!):

[Long Run]

If the impact is the same as Ross Perot had in 1992, then it will be a good thing -- bring fiscal sanity back in style. As for the pop belief that this "group" is full of dolts:

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/po ... f=politics

Of course, market conditions could have the same result.

[rubato]

"Tea party starting to have effect?"

Yes, they've elected Rand Paul, yet another nutcase racist right-wingnut. Who, in the 48 hours after his election has discovered that the world outside the mouth-breathing Tea-Baggers requires a higher level of coherence than he can supply:


___________________________

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010 ... -stage.php
#
Evan McMorris-Santoro: Tuesday night Paul delivered this warning to the political establishment: "What I say to Washington is, 'Watch out, here we come." Forty-eight hours later, he was on the run
EM-S: "His past caught up with him... the extreme libertarian fringe of the Republican party. And, as we found out this week, that means he has baggage. A lot of it. First, Paul told NPR that he took issue with parts of the Americans With Disabilities Act (as well as federal regulation of mining and the environment.) Then came the doozy -- a 20 minute discussion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on the Rachel Maddow Show.... Friday morning, Paul claimed that the way President Obama has been criticizing BP for helping to cause one of the largest oil spills in the nation's history was "un-American."... The week that began with Paul triumphantly bursting out onto the national stage ended with him slinking away from it. Perhaps not willing to take his still-green candidacy to broadcast journalism's most revered stage, Paul backed out of a long-planned interview on Meet The Press late Friday afternoon."

___________________________


So Rand-Boy how is it that your party screwed the country into the worst disaster in 80 years ?

yrs,
rubato

[Andrew D]

As for the pop belief that this "group" is full of dolts:

Tea Party supporters are wealthier and more well-educated than the general public, and are no more or less afraid of falling into a lower socioeconomic class, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/po ... f=politics

Actually, that's not true.

A misleading picture of Tea Partiers as college-educated and affluent came from a New York Times / CBS poll of people who merely "support," but don't necessarily have anything to do with, the Tea Party movement.

(John B. Judis, "Tea Minus Zero," The New Republic (27 May 2010) at p. 20.)

Surveys done of people who identify themselves as actually be "part of" the Tea Party movement -- surveys done by Quinnipiac, the Winston Group, and Economist / YouGov -- show that a majority of them are not college-educated, and their incomes are in the middle range. That does not make them "wealthier [or] more well-educated than the general public ...."