George Rebane
KVMR News Director Paul Emery comments (here) that – “A recent Gallop Poll shows that 80% of Tea Party affiliates are Republicans and have voted Republican in the last three election cycles. The poll indicates that they will vote Rupublican in the next election. 12% are Democrats and only 8% are Independents. This indicates to me that the Tea Party is the same Conservative faction of the Republican Party with a different logo.”
This revisits the ongoing proposition that there is no essential difference between the Republicans and the members of the various TP affiliated organizations across the country. However, the Republican Party leadership seems to disagree. They evince this disagreement by their ongoing and concerted effort to get the TP affiliates to endorse the party and/or their candidates running in the various elections this fall. Were they sanguine about the two ‘groups’ being identical or even of the same mind, they would not continue these overtures.
So how does this “different logo” question resolve itself? Perhaps the following graphic can shed some light.
Let the big rectangle represent the set of all political principles/beliefs. The red circle then represents such beliefs actually ‘acted out’ or implemented by the recent Republicans – this is their walk instead of their talk. The blue circle represents the same for the recent Democrats. The intersection of these two circles shows how much commonality there is in how the two parties actually behave. The black circle represents the political principles/beliefs of those declaring themselves to be members of the various TP affiliates. And yes, the overlap here is mostly with the Republicans.
But here comes the problem for the Republicans. As long as they cannot budge the black circle to encompass more of their recent political principles (that have departed from their stated beliefs), the TP, holding firm to its principles, will either force candidates of both parties to come their way, or even invite a third party to come into being that would really screw (mostly) the Republican establishment. This potential is represented by the dashed tan circle denoting the beliefs/actions of independent candidates and possible third parties.
One thing we can be sure of is that all factions of the existing political class are fighting a sanitary problem in their shorts – they all acknowledge that the people populating the black TP circle is already big and growing. That’s why one side is spending so much energy attempting to snuff the TP movement and the other side is doing its best to co-opt it. If that weren’t so, no one would care.
This explains why there is a difference between the TP as a principled movement of governance, and the established ‘political class’ of either party. And the purpose of the TP movement is to grow in number so that it can affect the shift of all partisan candidates to endorse and behave more closely to the common principles – fiscal responsibility, Constitutionality, capitalism – that the individual TP members embrace, and through which lens (black circle) they will evaluate candidates and so cast their votes. This is a difference and a distinction that goes beyond the commonly asserted “different logos” argument.
Thoughts?
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