The Coming Tea Party "Hope And Change" Deficit

By Steve Hynd

Some regular readers aren't going to like this, but here's how I see it: Tea partiers aren't all that different psychologically from Obamatrons. The latter catapulted Obama into power on a heady but unfortunately insubstantial diet of "hope and change". Many have since abandoned him when he turned out to be just another patsy who kowtowed to corporate interests on healthcare, bank bailouts and jobs stimulus while perpetuating the elite's bi-partisan "war on terror" with all it entailled for foreign and domestic policy. The tea party too is built on essentially the same nebuleous wish for "hope and change" and by 2012 will have withered as its leaders are also revealed as just another set of corporatist shills, riding poor-folks anger at government-by-elite into power.

Which is why people like "Dodd" at Outside The Beltway are missing an important point. He correctly says that liberals dismiss the Tea Party at their peril - but misses that it's for essentially the same reasons that Republicans were unwise to dismiss the Obama campaign in the early stages of its 2008 presidential campaign, when Obama was the clear underdog to Clinton. It's a movement fuelled by populist anger which is ultimately redirected to put just another bunch of elite apparatchiks in office.

Dodd quotes Peter Berkowitz writing for the Wall Street Journal (the combination of a Hoover think-tanker who was once on Guiliani's foreign policy team writing for Murdoch's flagship wasn't enough of a "vested elite" red flag, apparently):

Born in response to President Obama�s self-declared desire to fundamentally change America, the tea party movement has made its central goals abundantly clear. Activists and the sizeable swath of voters who sympathize with them want to reduce the massively ballooning national debt, cut runaway federal spending, keep taxes in check, reinvigorate the economy, and block the expansion of the state into citizens� lives.

Except in elite-Republican spin, the first and third of those are mutually exclusive. We long ago passed the stage where cutting government could make up the losses imposed by deficit interest payments, even if we took a chainsaw to the runaway military budget (something which very few Tea party leaders are proposing, and those that do are being sidelined fast by the elite's message machine). It's debatable whether government spending is neccessary to "reinvigorate the economy" but all the evidence - after two Bush terms and two years of Obama's preservation of the tax status quo - is that tax cuts alone are not sufficient.

And as for "block the expansion of the state into citizen's lives" - really? There's not a single central Tea Party leader, with the sole exception of the fast-being-marginalized senior Paul, who is calling for less domestic spying by a rapidly growing salad bowl of privately-contracted snoopers; less interference in free movement of air passengers in the light of mostly purile and easily containable threats; less rather than more legislation telling ordinary people how they can run their lives.

The disconnect between what ordinary tea partiers want and what they are doubtless going to get from their self-annointed leaders should tell us that they're headed for a massive crash once the "hopeiness and changeiness" is dumped - once those leaders have their seats at the corporatist trough on the Hill. In that, they're going to be just like the progressive bamatrons who quickly discovered that Obama was just another suit full of bugger-all.

Where things will go from their is anyone's guess. Cynically - onto the next "grassroots" movement that can be co-opted by corporate-backed elites like the Obama campaign's career politicos or the corporate elite of the Heartland Institute who are responsible for the latest book telling poor people what to think, the tea-party's "Patriot Toolbox".

Consider for a moment how that toolbox baldly tells tea partiers that it's first principle is that "Health care is a service, not a right". Compare with the Obama administration's corrupt insistence on changing a positive freedom - universal healthcare as a right - into an imposed system of mandates, fines and subsidies that turned that right which could have been freely given into an imposed service which many resented. They're not very far apart - both serve the corporate machine more than they serve those lacking medical care.

Uncynically - maybe, just maybe, the next grassroots movement will be one that vested elite interests do not suceed in co-opting and we'll get a real movement standing up for the rights of America's once-working class - one that realizes the elite are the problem, not the head-games they play with us with their Democratic and Republican parties, their Obamatrons and the Tea Partiers. Sadly, I won't be holding my breathe - but I will be quietly hoping for real change, some day.