TEA PARTIERS The tea party was always a loose collection of Americans who banded together to protest policies implemented at the beginning of the Obama era - bailouts, stimulus, Obamacare, Dodd-Frank. The primary disagreements between outsider candidates and the GOP establishment now is about tactics, not policy. If we are to say that people like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz are tea party type Republicans, its because they are willing to risk a lot of political capital in order to push through a GOP agenda - filibusters, budget disagreements, etc. - despite their minority status. This isnt new, though. In the first elections after tea parties began happening, we saw people like Scott Brown and Marco Rubio win surprising victories in a wave of grassroots conservative energy. Theyve got only a tenuous connection with what we might call outsider conservatives at this point. The tea party was always about a grassroots energy that the GOP machine tried to translate into electoral victory. Silver writes that its time to abandon the phrase Tea Party as a proper noun. It should really never have been coined in the first place. The phrase the tea party implies more organization in and of itself than necessary. Ive personally tried to use the phrase tea partier or tea partiers. There are individuals who have worked with or within assorted tea parties, but the tea party is never something that has accurately described this recent grassroots conservative movement.
Posted on: Sun, 25 May 2014 14:34:30 +0000
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