Which brings us to the Tea Party. Despite all the headlines about their impact on the upcoming midterms, I have a theory that out in the political heartland, the trashing by the Tea Partiers may be preparing the battlefield for a much more profound second wave of disaffected, independent voters, who could make the Tea Party look like, well, a tea party.
I've always called them the Militant Middle, and Gary Butts is a founding member. "It's about time the moderates stood up and said, 'Hey, we're in the majority here!'"
He is with ModerateVoters.org, based in Irvine, California, and he says the Militant Middle started growing and coalescing around a broad slogan of "Throw the bums out" long before the Tea Party even started brewing -- and now it's reached a boiling point.
He's not alone. Comedy Central's Jon Stewart stirred the waters with his call for a Million Moderate March on Washington the day before Halloween to "restore sanity."
Stewart tells his devoted audience, "We live in troubled times with real people facing very real problems; problems that have real if imperfect solutions that I believe 70 to 80 percent of our population could agree to try and could ultimately live with. Unfortunately the conversation and process is controlled by the other 15 to 20 percent."
The problem with this is that any "centrist" movement like this always becomes co-opted by the conservative tendencies of the Village. It would be nice if Americans stood up for fiscally conservative, socially liberal policies, but what happens is it becomes fiscally conservative, socially conservative instead because that's what the Village wants.
The real problem was never the Tea Party. The real problem is the corporate media that empowers it and ignores the moderates as much as they do progressives. If you want to take control of the process from the 15 or 20 percent, as Jon Stewart says, you have to take the real control away from the 0.1% that is the Village first.
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