Appeasing the Teabaggers: the Republics mea culpa?

[keopeli]

Will the 2010 Election become popcorn time on the internet for Democrats?

The Teabaggers (aka Teabag Party, Tea Party, Teabag Movement) was created completely by the Republic Party. It started with Sarah Palin, who quit her brief job as Governor of oil rich Alaska to harness the social conservative base of the Republican Party.

The social conservative wing, which includes funding groups by people like Dick Armey with LOTS OF MONEY, are represented to the public by Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, who have focused on ruining Obama. Rush uses his traditional "white, southern, smart-ass, know-it-all, god-fearing redneck" shtick while the new Glenn Beck appeals to the libertarian minded folks and militia movement fringe groups that supported Ron Paul in 08.

In the heady early days of Obama's presidency, the Republics were recalcitrant. Ailes used Fox News to self-promote small gatherings, including early Tea Party events. They bused in participants, printed protest signs, choreographed crowd participation for the cameras and lied to viewers about the size of the crowd, all in an attempt to make it look bigger than it really was. They chided other media for failing to cover the Teabaggers (aka...etc).

One caveat the Tea Bagger Society poses is that they don't like Republics any more than they like Democrats. (Well, a little more, but not much.) After all, they spend too much. (In 2012, this theme will fit nicely with the Republics planned (losing) strategy - gut social security.)

It is now the beginning of the 2010 election season and Republics are making a strong appeal for clemency to the Tea Bagger Party. They paid Palin to go talk to them and ask them to vote Republic. They paid Beck to keynote the CPAC event and tolerated him saying "Republicans are no better than Democrats" when it comes to spending. They are passing a Republic Purity Test which vows that they will not increase spending and will cut taxes (and won't have sex until they're married and only with women.) The Teabagger community is saying that they might give the Republics "one more shot" before they form a third party.

In other words, the Republics are trying to formulate their own "mea culpa" for their free-spending habits of the last 30 years. Never mind that they've been saying "Read my lips...no new taxes" since the 1980s and breaking that promise ever since. They think they deserve another shot.

In 06 and 08, the voters sent a clear message that they were fed up with the Republics and their wasteful spending over a 30 year period. In the worst economy since the Depression, with the worst Republicans in memory obstructing Congress, all the Democrats need to do is pass some effective legislation on health care and jobs. They have both the time and the votes to do it.

The question then becomes how far the Republics are willing to commit to the orthodoxy of the Teabaggers. Because a line has been drawn in the sand by none other than Glenn Beck himself: all Republics elected after 2010 can not raise taxes and can not increase spending. Every time they do, they risk losing the Teabaggers and, more importantly, Glenn Beck himself.

This Tea Party Monster has already scared the Republics to death. They even let Cheney out of his cave to speak at CPAC just for the torture loving lot of them. Everyone BUT the Republics were surprised at the outcome of the straw poll at CPAC: Ron Paul. Hmmm...

The Democrats do have a difficult electoral climate in 2010, but that doesn't mean Republics have an easy one. Their fractured party is so tenuously strung together that, should the Democrats fortunes turn around even slightly by summer, liberals and progressives might enjoy the election season after all...as a spectator sport.

[Walk away]

1. They are Teabaggers. They can call themselves any a.k.a. they want...

but they are Teabaggers.

[keopeli]

2. ok, sure, i'll change the subject line

they couldn't have picked a better name as far as I'm concerned!

it's obvious Luntz wasn't consulted.

peace

[Walk away]

5. OK...then now it's perfect!

I can't help it. It pisses me off that they are successfully changing their image without changing their insane ideology. We should be sure not to help them by referring to them as a "Party" and not the nut job 'Baggers that they are.

[Cartoonist]

3. Racist Roots

It most certainly did not start with Sarah Palin. Teabaggers came out of the woodwork and crawled out from under their rocks as soon as a black man was elected president. They started mis-spelling signs and shouting at town hall meetings the day after Obama was inaugurated. The republican party merely rounded them up by pandering to them and seeding them talking points.
While I am worried about their potential for violence, they make up only the twenty-five percent that remained loyal to George Bush in his waning days. The GOP hasn't gained a single new voter among the teabaggers. They were theirs already.

[vixengrl]

4. I think there's something very amiss in how people read the Tea Partiers.

They look like they are doing something, but they aren't. They have very deeply held beliefs, but many of them can't draw on any facts. They are overwhelmingly older, whiter, more Christian, and might say things like "I'm an Independent" or "I think of myself as a Liberterian"--but they will probably vote Republican because:

They hate liberals.

End of story. Liberal is strictly the "L-word" as far as they are concerned. And even if they can't exactly put together how a multicultural, civil rights-supporting, anti-torture lefty is like Hitler, they will believe it. Oh, you can point out that we're the pro-gay folks who think women are good for being more than brood mares--kind of the opposite of the social outlook of the Nazis, but if being intentionally obtuse was good enough for noted public intellectual Jonah Goldberg (:rofl: ), why it's good enough for them, even if they haven't read his book so much as heard Glenn Beck mention it. They really just need to know the book exists. Like the Bible, some books are better for swearing by than reading, anyway.

(Look at Free Republic comments sometimes: We're elitists, but Libtards. We're condescending, but we just don't understand common sense. We're run by George Soros and welfare queens. And we're all Woodstock era hippies, even the young ones.)

A poll recently found that a lot of these people don't realize their taxes have gone down under Obama. Some of them don't seem to know Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security are actually all government programs. And, well, they are angry because, I think they realize, even though they and Fox News shamelessly inflate their numbers--they are not the majority. They wish they were. They just aren't.

(Some stuff gathered by some blogger about it, here:

http://vixenstrangelymakesuncommonsense.blogspot.com/2009/11/26-ers-and-conservative-number-lies.html )

What the demonstrative nature of the Tea Party movement has done is drag the GOP further right, but also made them ineffective as far as proposing anything. I think the Democratic Party's most effective strategy is ignoring the Tea Partiers (who have no interest in us, anyway), being more vocal about why our proposals will save more money, be more fiscally responsible, and for crying out loud call the GOP out when they do stuff like sit out the proposed commission on deficit reduction--really? They can't even try doing the stuff they supposedly stand for? Or call them out when they don't recognize that there's deficit-reduction built into the HRC proposal. It won't win over the tea-baggers, but it will impress the people who are actually committed to making things better, and not, you know, just candidates for being committed.

[Zoeisright]

6. Shouldn't that be the Repubic party?

They are, after all, so fascinated with other people's sexuality and how to control it.