Posted on 09/17/2010 8:09:33 AM PDT by Tom D.
The Tea Party and Insurgency Politics
Nearly every American with a political memory recalls that Texas billionaire Ross Perot captured 19 percent of the vote when he ran for president as an independent candidate in 1992. Less well known is what happened to that vote afterward. Therein lies an intriguing political lesson that bears on today’s Tea Party movement, which emerged on the political scene nearly 17 months ago and has maintained a sustained assault on the Republican establishment ever since.
Just this week, the Tea Party scored another upset triumph, this time in Delaware, where protest candidate Christine O’Donnell outpolled establishment scion Michael N. Castle in the Republican primary for the U.S. Senate. It was merely the latest in a string of political rebellions that have shaped this campaign year much as the Perot phenomenon influenced American politics in the 1990s.
Two years after the Texan’s remarkable 19 percent showing, the Perot vote — a protest movement spawned primarily by political anxiety over what was considered fiscal recklessness at the federal level (sound familiar?) — washed away the Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. In a stern rebuke to President Bill Clinton, the Perot constituency gave full congressional control to the Republican Party for the first time in four decades. And then, just two years later, it turned around and helped elect Clinton to a second term.
The political lesson, worth pondering in these times of Tea Party rumbling, is that serious protest movements such as the Perot phenomenon or today’s Tea Party revolt never just fade away. . . . .
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The Tea Party and Insurgency Politics is republished with permission of STRATFOR.
(Excerpt) Read more at stratfor.com ...
The TPM is different in that it is moving against the people that do the most damage.
Perot was NOT a credible leader of the movement.
The TP, has made the right move in not hitching it’s wagon to any one person. It has accepted the support of ,Palin, DeMint, etc, etc. It is a bottom up movement not oweing alliegence to any one person. That is the differrence, but this is a weakness. Many will attempt to place themselves in a vaulted position. and ofcourse the msm will make an attempt at crowning a TPM standard bearer. The mem hates the fact that they can’t get someone to destroy or make fun of in the coming massacre of THEIR candidates in the coming election.
And anyone that doesn’t follow the “conventional wisdom” of the msm will be alternately ridiculed, researched, ridicled.
O’Donnell’s immediate blowback may have held them off for a while but, make no mistake they will come back at her in a stronger and much more vicious attack.
They will do everything they can to tarnish the TP and it's candidates...along with their normal/routine bashing of the GOP candidates.
However, once the SLAUGHTER of Nov 2nd sets in...and folks awaken from their great "commie party" with a hangover, you'll see the MSM CHEERING the T-Party insurgency. It'll make great copy for them.
You MIGHT even see MSM advocacy for a Palin presidency.
He will be so thoroughly discredited...a buffoonish cartoon character will be the meme...that members of his own party will ridicule him in public.
“As for today’s Tea Party partisans, they don’t trust Washington, which they see as a place of mutual back-scratching, earmark collaborations, power grabs and what seems like unlimited amounts of money sloshing around for buying votes and for the personal aggrandizement of elected officeholders and their minions. The Tea Party aim is to attack that political establishment by capturing the forces of the Republican Party and then directing those forces against the perceived entrenched power of Washington.
Will it succeed? Not clear. But it is clear that this political phenomenon, which burst upon the scene so unexpectedly and has rumbled along with such force the past year and a half, isn’t going away anytime soon. It will continue to wreak havoc in the precincts of establishment politics until this establishment finds a way to siphon off a big portion of Tea Party anger with a brand of politics that absorbs at least some of its sentiment. History suggests there is no other way to tame this beast.”
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