Posted on 01/07/2012 10:12:20 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
I don't know what happened between November of 2010 and January of 2012, but from the looks of things the Tea Party died.
How else do you explain it?
Rewind to November of 2010, race after race, congressional seat after congressional seat, Governorship after Governorship. Only a little more than eighteen months after President Obama had packed the mall in Washington for his historic inaugural, the Tea Party held it's historic event in which nearly the same size audience had attended--according to maps supplied by the USA Today. That event catapulted a state by state tsunami-like momentum where grassroots, low tax, small government, pro-founding principles, pro-life, pro-national security, and pro-God forces aligned and an election victory of historic equivalence shook America in 2010.
The driving force of that agitation then as it is still today was the effect of a poor economy, government intervention, federal overreach, bureaucratic mandates, and punitive taxes on the nation's beleaguered small business community. Entitlements, bail-outs, and criminally reckless spending ensued.
The Tea Party believed that the buffoons authoring the mess should be dealt a blow. And in 2010 they leveled power in the Congress.
The single biggest example of this overreach was for Washington politicians, behind closed doors, with no transparency, to take a health care reform law--deem it as passed--and force upon the American people the worst piece of legislation to be passed since World War II. Little wonder that even the worst Vice President in our history, Joe Biden, used an expletive to describe it.
"Obamacare" as it would soon become monikered was and is at this very moment--in this election cycle--the singular most visible sign that this nation must take a different course.
Some very good people got elected in 2010 to attempt to help lay the groundwork for the complete repeal of Obamacare. Star-On-The-Rise Governor Nikki Haley in South Carolina, and Senator-soon-to-be-the-next-Vice-President Marco Rubio rode the shoulders of these Tea Party votes, and pledged with their victories to return power to the voice of "We The People." The failed candidacies of Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell were also propped up almost entirely by the support of these first amendment patriots who simply wished to keep government in check.
Former Governor Sarah Palin rallied these troops, showed up and helped them raise cash, enthusiasm, and enlistments. The numbers of the Tea Party were tens of thousands of times bigger than the largest Occupy Wall Street gatherings--combined!
Yet only a little over a year later and the goal of the Tea Party to complete it's work and overturn Obamacare is all but dead.
In 2010 even Ann Coulter was making speeches at CPAC warning that if we chose the candidate who had authored Obamacare to become the nominee, then President Obama would be easily re-elected. She was right of course.
But somewhere along the line instead of being bold, defiant, grassroots, and in control, someone started feeding voters the meme that the man who saw to it that $50 state-subsidized abortions were included in his vision of mandated government health care, was the best of poor choices.
Even Ann Coulter 2.0 drank the kool-aid.
Worse yet the choices that are left in the race are establishment folks who ate earmarks for a living in Pennsylvania, embraced government involvement in the biggest hoax of our time--man made Global Warming, and who could forget the man that as Governor of Massachusetts raised taxes on everything from gasoline to "certificates of blindness." (No it's real... Look it up.)
Your humble correspondant has detailed the easy path that Obama's forces will take to not merely defeat a Romney GOP candidacy, but to pummel him into tapioca.
And according to my sources, campaign strategists who consult for the Obama team confirmed, they are getting the GOP candidate they most want.
I need to remind you that the win in Iowa meant strategically nothing. Those delegates will go to whoever the likely nominee is, and won't even be assigned until the convention. New Hampshire has a puny amount of delegate votes--but at least they will be genuine delegates. This year South Carolina is where the battle truly begins. South Carolina has more delegates than Iowa and New Hampshire combined and Tea Party strongholds from Virginia all the way around the coast to Texas are delegate rich battlegrounds.
The two biggest priorities for primary voters are to decide which candidate can make Washington DC as inconsequential to the life of the average American as possible, and who can challenge President Obama directly on the worst legislation of our time--Obamacare.
Mitt Romney has no track record that would point to being able to accomplish either of these. Even a small whiff of a challenge on Obamacare by Romney will be followed up with an Obama "thank you" note for writing it for him.
It is almost impossible to believe and violently sickening to accept that in light of the clear mandate of the Tea Party that the GOP stands on the cusp of returning to "establishmentism." (Imaginary word mine.) But it appears that for all the big talk, tens of thousands of local rallies, and the single largest non-inaugural event to ever occur on our nation's mall, the Tea Party has died.
Which is sad, for me personally, because I addressed those patriots, on that mall, that cloudy Washington DC day.
That first tea party in DC took place exactly three days after President Obama's joint session, where he had instructed his supporters on Obamacare to go "get in people's faces" if they disagreed with the policy. He told his critics that he was calling them out.
I remember bringing that little point to the attention of the close to 1.2 million gathered on the mall that afternoon. The chants of "Here we are, Here we are, Here we are" rang in my ears for days.
Sadly now I wonder, "Where'd we go?"
You’re welcome!
10-4!
Note the editorial reviews savaged the book. However, look at the customer review comments instead of the editorial writer's rantings for objective evaluations.
[Note to Vince: You know you're over the target when you're getting the maximum flak.]
After reading the article thoroughly I don't believe Kevin McCullough is qualified to make the prognosis. I see too many signs that like so many he doesn't really have a core understanding of what the Tea Party really is.
Ok, you go vote for Romney! RINO.
That expresses the problem quite well.
The TEA party originated from Rick Santelli's rant about bailouts, debt and Obamacare. It is/was a fiscal concept.
Due to it's lack of hierarchy various groups with non-fiscal agendas were able barge in on the movement in order to cash in on it's popularity.
In the real world, those groups should have iniated their own grassroots rallies to promote their agendas and judge their instrinsic worth (or lack thereof) among the voting populace as a whole.
I believe this election can be won via a focus on drawing from both sides to the center rather than a focus on increasing turnout in your own base as Rove did with W.
That's what the tea party caused originally. It was a movement that drew from adjacent centrist groups for fiscal reasons.
As groups from the outer left and right with non-fiscal agendas glommed on to the Tea Part movement, however, it has caused the dilution of focus from it's fiscal roots, as your phrase illustrates.
Exactly. I think the rallies were how the Tea Party became aware of itself, and now that that awareness has been established, things can kind of percolate with no overt public displays needed.
“Is he right?”
Yes. The tea party was co-opted by the gop. It’s dead-parrot dead. It’s not even pining for the fjords.
Two points to consider:
First, the “Perfect Tea Party Leader and Grand Poobah” would sound an awful lot like Ron Paul, except for the whacko foreign policy stuff. A fierce restoration of the Constitution would stomp on many, many toes and bring a lot of scorn from all directions. (One can easily argue that Social Security isn’t Constitutional, ya know!)
Secondly, setting up the Tea Party as a “third party” — as delightful as that sounds — should have been done the day after the 2010 election. Starting up something so big and radical as a new political party requires time for people to accept it. But it’s much too late now. Any third-party bid now, even by Sarah Palin, would gift-wrap another term for Obummer.
That being said, the Tea Party MOVEMENT has never ended. I’d love to hear them make some noise, so we can keep our spirits up, but I’ll still vote like a Tea Partier in any case.
During the first two years of Obama’s presidency, he had super majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate. This gave the Obama and the Dems unchecked power to ram through virtually any piece of radical left-wing legislation they wanted. The Republicans were powerless to stop anything. That’s where the Tea Party came in... We formed to start keeping Washington accountable for their reckless out-of-control spending and to adhere to the U.S. Constitution. We also made sure we were going to make a dramatic impact in the November 2012 elections and help put the brakes on Obama’s agenda. We succeeded not only by electing the largest wave of GOP and Tea Party candidates in 70 years, but we recaptured the House and gained in the Senate.
Now that Congress at least has the ability to keep Obama and the Dems’ radical left-wing agenda in gridlock mode, I think many Tea Party people are taking a breather. It’s difficult to sustain the feverish intensity required to oppose this left-wing regime for years on end, especially when we have family and jobs to attend to. And the Tea Party knows full well 2012 is going to require every ounce of fight we have left in us to throw Obama out of office. It will be intense. It will be draining. And the Tea Party knows it. And that’s why I think many of us have been concentrating on restoring our energy over the past year for the epic battle to come in 2012.
The Tea Party hasn’t gone away. Not at all. And don’t for one second start buying into the media narrative that is has. It’s simply rekindling its fire and getting ready to unleash itself once again for the United States of America’s last stand against left-wing tyranny in 2012. You just watch.
Amen, amen, amen!
Well stated, DestroyLiberalism.
Yeah...I get those solicitations too....they go in the trash.
We WORK for a living. Just wait till next September. We'll be back.
It was never quite what most thought it was anyway. You don't get that kind of immediate nation wide presence without a lot of organization and money from somewhere.
Another reason is that the GOP saw the Tea party as a much bigger threat than the Dems did. And rightly so.
God, I HATE crap like this. How else do you explain it? Is he kidding? The Tea Party not only didn't die, but it's probably stronger now than it ever was. But even THAT doesn't stop GOP establishment betrayal. Nothing will stop their betrayal while they're in office. And there will continue to be betrayal until we vote out the likes of Boehner and McConnell (not to mention senators like Collins and Snowe).
How dare this nitwit presume that the Tea Party is dead simply because our representatives and senators screwed us once again? Talk about drinking the Kool-Aid. This guy's drinking the media Kool-Aid, barfing it back up, and saying, "Look, I told you the Tea Party was dead."
We're here, we're growing stronger, and we'll throw out even more of the bums this November. In spite of idiot articles like this or, even, Ann Coulter 2.0.
Yes, he is. The Tea Party celebrated a bit too much after the mid-terms, got fat, and went home to watch American Idol with the rest of the country.
I must also admit that I believe the negative coverage from the media was demoralizing and played a part in keeping it from becoming a lasting movement.
BTTT
No. :)
Hitler came to the rescue of Germany, Germany did not die, it survived to be reborn. I fear we may have to go through the same sort of rebirth.
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