George Rebane
The cartoon by friend and RR reader RL ‘Balanced Bob’ Crabb appears in today’s (24may11) Union. Balanced Bob is a self-proclaimed down-the-middle observer of our partisan puffings and pitfalls. Here he administers a well-worn leftwing swipe at the tea party movement by taking it to task for being too focused as an organization. The tea party attracts its members through the narrow door of small government, fiscal responsibility, constitutionality, and free markets.
The tea party members (and I am one) take these as a limited yet powerful set of goals for governance that many people can agree on. We don’t cover the waterfront as a political party might by also espousing social goals, a foreign policy, and so on. This doesn’t mean that tea party members don’t each have their own beliefs and ideas about all those things; it’s just that these are not germane to their membership in our particular organization. Sorta like the National Organization for Women not taking a stand on free markets (maybe they do?).
But a standard tack of the left, when at a disadvantage on the main point of an argument, is to immediately defocus it in either the topical and/or the historical dimension. To their mind this is a perfectly valid method of discourse, especially political discourse. For example, if a proposition is made that ‘high school education would be improved by putting only qualified teachers into classrooms’, then a teachers’ union progressive would deflect the argument by accusing his counterpart of not caring for the quality of grade school education by omitting that from his proposition. Or even more egregiously, applying the historical gambit, ‘Yeah? Well where were you guys when we tried to do that ten years ago?’ Examples of this abound in the comment streams of these pages.
So here we have Balanced Bob now tilting at the tea party from the left in order to keep his credentials in equilibrium. But the part that I’m having trouble understanding is how are we being “deceptive” by constantly publishing our focused emphasis on the principles we espouse. And just because they were never meant to be comprehensive does not mean that tea party members wear blinders and are ignorant about the other issues on which their candidates take a stance.
I may not be among the most knowledgeable of tea party members – for which I apologize – but I do invite anyone sharing Bob’s view of the organization to button hole a member and talk to him/her about their knowledge of candidates and other issues. It is the tea party kind of large scale awakening of the American electorate that keeps slogan-slinging politicos awake nights.
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