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- iHaveNet.com: Politics
by Clarence Page
I attended the
"Be careful," warned a liberal friend, sounding as though she feared I would be cursed, spat upon and called the N-word as I was pummeled to the ground.
After all, if you judge the movement by much of its news coverage, I am what the Tea Partiers are supposed to hate. I am black. I work in what Rush Limbaugh calls the "lame-stream media." I don't think President Obama's health care overhaul is a "government takeover" of health care.
Yet I am happy to report that I was not abused, unless you count the whiny voice of Victoria Jackson, a former "Saturday Night Live" cast member now trying to be the tea party movement's Lady Gaga.
Her anthem, "Communist in the
But there were normal people, too. For example, I met Chicagoan Fred Groat, a retired business executive who lives "surrounded by lakefront liberals" on the city's north side. He voted for President George W. Bush, but now calls Bush a "RINO, Republican in Name Only," for running up the deficit and failing to "secure the borders."
He's not alone. Tea parties lack much in the way of formal structure, leadership or agendas because their movement is an orphan, unified by a shared sense of abandonment by Republicans and cluelessness by Democrats -- most of whom probably would say that the feeling is mutual.
As much as media portray the tea party as something new, spontaneous political movements have been springing up, making noise for a few years, then fading away since before the founding of the Republic. This one just happens to be fired up during the first term of the nation's first black president.
That makes it easy to suspect the tea party movement is racist, especially if you have an elastic definition of racism. But polls and conversations with tea partiers tend to confirm my sense that race brings no more than a teeny cup to this tea party.
Looming larger in their lives are issues like money, culture and a leave-us-alone view of government -- until, of course, they bump up against an issue on which they can use government's help.
A new
Yet, despite their rightward leanings, the Times/
Maybe that's because 64 percent of tea partiers in the poll said the Obama administration had raised taxes or kept them the same. That's about twice the percentage of Americans overall. Either way, it's wrong. In fact, economic stimulus legislation, much maligned on the right, resulted in a tax cut on 2009 tax returns. That helped bring taxes to their lowest levels in 60 years, according to William Gale, co-director of the Tax Policy Center and director of the
No wonder President Obama when asked about the Tax Day protests said, "You would think they would be saying, 'Thank you.' " Maybe you would, if the tax cuts received as much airtime as the administration's critics do. But it's not easy to bring people to the streets in favor of what a
Available at Amazon.com:
The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House
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