Posted on 09/26/2010 6:21:57 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
THE BIG PICTURE: Right-wing rhetoric is one thing but the real test will be whether Palin and Co can show the ability for systematic thinking needed for government
IN 1975, the recently retired governor of California, Ronald Reagan, flew to Britain to beef up his foreign policy credentials as a presidential aspirant. He could hardly get in to see anyone.
The prime minister, Harold Wilson, refused to meet him. Jim Callaghan, the foreign secretary, preferred to attend Splott Fair in his own constituency. In the end, Reagan was palmed off on the junior foreign office minister, Roy Hattersley, who made it clear that the meeting was “a matter of courtesy rather than in order to do any serious business”.
While Reagan espoused his economic views, remembered Hattersley, “the usually well-mannered young men from the Foreign Office who sat beside me made choking noises”. Fast forward to 1981 and those same spluttering mandarins were dealing with Reagan as leader of the world’s number one power.
Politicians on the right, particularly ones the public like, have often found it difficult to be taken seriously by the chattering classes. Even today, despite winning the cold war and delivering three decades of economic prosperity, Reagan is still often presented as a mixture of cowboy and idiot savant. There’s just no convincing some people.
In 1975 it was Reagan and his libertarian conservatives who were dismissed as dangerous cranks by the governmental and media establishment. Today in the United States, it is the Tea Party movement that has upset the political apple cart. To defeat them, opined a New York Times editorial recently, “has become imperative to avoid the sense of national embarrassment from each divisive and offensive utterance, each wacky policy proposal”.
That line may work when preaching to the liberal choir from the pulpit of the Times (although New York may yet end up with a Tea Party governor in Carl Paladino). But this outrage does little to explain the momentum that is gathering behind a new political phenomenon. For what began as conservative fury in the immediate aftermath of the election of President Obama has developed a clarity that is attracting widespread support, even among independents.
Part of that clarity comes in its appraisal of the Obama administration and the Democrat-controlled congress. Since 2009, say Tea Party advocates, there has been a spending bonanza of unimaginable proportions. This includes a huge stimulus package (that has failed to stimulate), the nationalisation of health care at vast expense, rising taxes and an attack on business at a time when Americans need jobs. These are not short-term problems: Americans will be in hock to the tune of trillions of dollars for decades to come.
“Here is the great virtue of the Tea Party,” says Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan: “They know what time it is. It’s getting late. If we don’t get the size and the cost of government in line now, we won’t be able to.” That resonates with the generations that grew up in the decades after the second World War, when America’s share of global GDP was 45 per cent. Many fear a future for their children in which a country saddled with a vast debt and a bloated, sclerotic government is simply unable to rise to the challenge posed by new economic powers such as China, India, Russia and Brazil.
Widespread agreement with that assessment has damaged the Democratic Party, which goes into November’s mid-term elections in low spirits. Independent voters who will tip the balance at the polls do not seem to have been put off by the involvement of the “wacky” Tea Party movement in the Republican Party. Far from it. Many Democrats fear voters may desert the president’s party in droves.
Recent numbers show that independent voters, who broke for Barack Obama by 52 per cent to 44 per cent in the 2008 presidential election, are now moving strongly in the direction of the Republican Party. Staggeringly, those independents who say they intend to vote in November break better than two-to-one in favour of the Republicans. Forty-eight per cent of all independents surveyed said they were “sympathetic to or supporters of the Tea Party”. In many states, such as Kentucky and Florida, Tea Party candidates are streets ahead, despite bitter primary races, and even a weak candidate such as Sharron Angle remains level pegging in Nevada.
In the northeast, where the Republicans had been virtually wiped out by 2008, there has been a palpable resurgence of support. In Pennsylvania, the native state of vice-president Joe Biden that has trended Democratic since 2000, the president’s approval rating has slumped. In key battle grounds such as Pennsylvania’s eighth Congressional District, where two Irish-American candidates are slogging it out, the president’s popularity has flipped from 55 per cent to 42 per cent positive last year to 53 per cent to 43 per cent negative today.
This is bad news for the incumbent Democrat, Patrick Murphy. “We’re going to make him defend everything,” says Mike Fitzpatrick, his opponent. Fitzpatrick might not be a Tea Party purist, but his message of “smaller, more efficient government, less spending, lower taxes” resonates with the agenda they have set.
For Fitzpatrick and traditional candidates like him, the Tea Party movement has re-energised conservative supporters and swept the Republican Party along with it. That’s good news for the party heading towards November, but in the longer term it may turn out to be a mixed blessing. For while the Tea Party movement has helped define the debate around this president, its more important contribution may turn out to be the critique of the Republican Party itself.
Certainly the Tea Party has tapped into a very real public anger that the Obama administration has overspent, overtaxed and over-committed. Yet the narrative it has constructed is also a fierce indictment of the Bush presidency.
“[They] are the reason we even have the Tea Party movement,” wrote Fox News favourite Andrea Tantoros in New York Daily News , after Karl Rove (“Bush’s brain”) admonished Republicans in Delaware for picking Tea Party activist Christine O’Donnell as a candidate for the Senate. After all, Tantoros noted, “Bush ran up deficits” and gave the US “open borders, tax cuts that expire, Medicare part D and busted budgets”.
As last year’s gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia demonstrated, Tea Party activists and Republican moderates can work well together when necessary to deliver election victories. But there is already an impending sense of the ideological struggle to come once November is over.
Then all eyes will turn to the real prize: the presidential election of 2012. Tea Party activists may not like Barack Obama, but they admire the way he won the last election, not least the “netroots” of political activists who helped him defeat an “establishment” machine candidate. Already they are planning a similar campaign to make sure that one of their own secures the Republican nomination.
The unknown element in that battle is the quality of Tea Party ideas. Thus far they have skilfully cultivated a simple message and deployed charismatic leaders such as Sarah Palin and Marco Rubio to articulate it with authentic conviction. Yet to emerge is a serious sense of the systematic thinking about government that would put those aspirations into practice. In the end this will be the real test of whether the Tea Party movement represents a seismic event in conservatism or is just a noisy distraction.
For a movement that puts plain speaking, values and common sense at a premium, this may seem unnecessarily cerebral. But Tea Party activists need only look to the example of two iconic figures of the right to recognise how significant this is.
Reagan too had the charisma and ability to articulate his beliefs with moral conviction and a popular touch. But underpinning the Reagan era was a neo-liberal intellectual ferment that tipped the social democratic consensus upside down, shifting public debate and preparing the way for a Republican victory in 1980. Characteristic of this activity was the work of the Heritage Foundation, which produced the 3,000-page Mandate for Leadership that became the comprehensive blueprint for the administration.
The second example is Margaret Thatcher, who is revered by, among others, Palin. Thatcher may not have been an intellectual or an original political thinker in the purest sense.
Yet she was a consumer of ideas, devouring the books and papers put in front of her by Alfred Sherman at the Centre for Policy Studies. Her great ability was to give those ideas clarity. If Palin is following the Thatcher model, she will currently be reading everything she can lay her hands on.
Thatcher came to power in a “peasant’s revolt” against the leadership of her own party. She was often patronised and derided by conservative grandees and liberal journalists alike. Yet few if any of them won an argument head-to-head with her, as she took them on in a war of attrition, idea by idea, backed up with her uniquely individual style of moral conviction.
That ability to articulate a new way of thinking made her a star in the United States. On her first visit to Washington as prime minister in 1979, she electrified Congress not just with her conviction but with her incisiveness and intellectual rigour. Afterwards Republican politicians flocked around her. Later one sent her note: “Will you accept the nomination of the Republican party for president?” it asked.
The Republicans could not have Thatcher, but they did get Reagan instead. The Tea Party can only hope they have a leader of similar stature waiting in the wings.
For that reason perhaps the most pertinent question of the day has become, “Which books are you reading at the moment, Sarah?”
Look smartie pants
Palin is able to express what REAL AMERICANS are thinking
That is her appeal—she is a true representative, kapish?
Comments?
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Professor Aldous gets it. He understands the facts and the potentialities better than all of the American left, and better than most of the American right.
But for the nod to weakfish Noonan, a flawless article.
Thank you for posting it.
every word she speaks or writes is more carefully calculated than the performance if an icbm.
just because everyone is reminded of reagan by her...
everyone was reminded of jfk by the one.
where did that get us...
That's right, she is the closest thing to Reagan that we have seen since Reagan, and for many decades before, that is why she reminds people of Reagan.
Whine about something else.
You don’t see too many good ones like this. Most are “she’s a dummy & a quitter” and “she’ll get beat like a drum against Obama” and “he’ll wipe the floor with her in a debate” and so forth...
As an admirer of Thatcher, Reagan and Palin, what the hell is he talking about? Not original thinker? Or intellectual? I'll take their brand of intellect any day.
My apologies, not even sure how that happened.
“The unknown element in that battle is the quality of Tea Party ideas.”
This is complete nonsense. The ideas have advanced this far based specifically on their quality.
the only benefit i see with palin is if hillary offs the one at the convention and sarah secures nomination.
then we will all know the end is nigh.
I always laugh at the way the British think we don’t have the wits to govern ourselves, or don’t have the critical thinking skills to handle something as complex as voting or legislating. It’s as if the art died out with the Revolution, and every last shred of political wisdom stayed on the other side of the Atlantic.
I love this picture of Sarah Palin holding Mark Levin’s book.
The politician who comes to office thinking in a “systematic” way—rather than simply wanting to apply the simple ideas of the tea party movement—is a politician with the mind of a big government bureaucrat.
I love this clip of her taking on a couple socialists in her last appearance in the Commons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okHGCz6xxiw
Excellent assessment.
Call me paranoid, but I think the coming trend is for leftists to seem to give ground (like not criticizing Palin) while perpetrating their big government agenda in more deceitful ways.
One of the great side benefits of this movement is that all of the liberal Colleges and Universities will suddenly be on the wrong side of America. Looking forward to that change and hopefully, even the leftist propaganda will diminish. Heck, you might say that this movement is for the children!
Dr. Ron Paul is the best leader since Ben Franklin. Of course the war party is against him, and the liberals cannot stand anyone who talks about small government and the constitution.
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