Last year, an uprising began in this country, a grass-roots coming together (
sponsored by FOX News™) of voices across this great land, tired of paying taxes, angry about... something... and ready to "throw the bums out". They were loud and in front of every camera, disrupting the town hall meetings, and marching in their cute little protests. Pundits breathlessly debated whether there would be fireworks at the polls as Americans voted to send the incumbents home.
It's still a little early to tell, but it seems like those fireworks were duds. In most elections, the "Tea Party Effect" should be most felt in the Republican primaries and then the general election. However, there have been several primaries already, and in most cases, the "career politicians" won out. Perhaps people are still understanding what happens when you put "regular Joes" in office (ie: 8 years of Bush). Would you want your beer-swilling redneck neighbor next door running a large corporation where you worked? Not likely. It seems that voters in
Indiana, Ohio, and North Carolina also prefer a candidate with some political experience under their belt, for both Republicans and Democrats.
When it comes to policies, there have been some defectors as well. As most people would have expected, the horrendous oil spill in the Gulf has made governors in coastal states think twice about offshore drilling. One of the louder proponents of the "Drill Here - Drill Now" attitude
is having second thoughts:
...Gov. Bob Riley (R-AL) admitted he is reconsidering his support for offshore drilling off his state’s coast in the face of the growing BP oil disaster. Riley embraced Newt Gingrich’s campaign to expand offshore drilling in July, 2008, saying "we need to drill and we need to do it now."
[...]
Riley is the third Republican coastal-state governor to reconsider new offshore drilling as the reality of this disaster grows, following Gov. Charlie Crist (R-FL) and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA).
Even the unofficial "leader" of the tea partiers - Glenn Beck - is falling out of favor. In the last 5 months, he has
lost 1/3 of his viewers (not to mention countless advertisers). Is it his ever increasing histrionics? Is it his paranoid conspiracy theories? Perhaps it's just that viewers are wondering the same thing as
the leader of the "Oath Keepers" - Stewart Rhodes:
"That's the problem with people like Michelle Malkin, and apparently Glenn Beck -- and Rush Limbaugh is in the same camp -- during the Bush administration, you didn't hear a peep out of them about, oh, the president is overstepping constitutional boundaries, he's endangering the country, this stuff is unconstitutional. I didn't hear anything like that from those people."
"In fact, [it was] quite the opposite," he said. "Michelle Malkin was running around arguing why the internment of Japanese Americans was proper and necessary, [like] they were really dangerous people. You know, [she was] laying the groundwork, overtly, for interning Arab Americans."
"Apparently Glenn Beck is the same way," Rhodes concluded. "He was kissing Bush's booty and now he's counting his change... It's all complete hypocrisy... Even Rush Limbaugh admitted that he was just carrying their water."
There are still more primaries, and more chances for legislation to bring the heat up again, but for now it seems the tea at the party has grown tepid. Perhaps they should try a little sugar in their tea, instead of all the venom.
55 comments )
