It's What We Say The Tea Party Is

Over at the Washington Post, Dan Balz reviews what the Tea Party means to American politics.  It's boilerplate stuff really, but the real red flag comes up here:

That the tea party sprang to life during Obama’s presidency should have been less surprising than it was. According to Alan Abramowitz of Emory University, “The tea party movement can best be understood in the context of the long-term growth of partisan-ideological polarization within the American electorate and especially the growing conservatism of the activist base in the Republican Party.”

Over the past three decades, the size of the base within the party has grown significantly. At the same time, those activists were becoming more and more conservative in their views — and more and more hostile in their evaluations of the opposing party. When these activists were asked to rate Democratic presidential candidates on a thermometer scale of 1 to 100, the average fell “from a lukewarm 42 degrees in the late 1960s to a very chilly 26 degrees in the 2000s,” Abramowitz said.

In other words, the Republican base was primed to dislike Obama as president. In fact, it already did before he was ever sworn in. “People attending the tea party events that began early in the Obama administration expressed the same vehement hostility toward Obama first observed at campaign rallies for John McCain and Sarah Palin” in the fall of 2008, writes Gary Jacobson of the University of California at San Diego.

People forget that the Tea Party never gave President Obama a chance, nor were they ever going to.  They had pulled out the racist garbage before he was ever elected, and people conveniently forget that when discussing how the Tea Party wing of the GOP can't possibly be racist.  Michele Bachmann was doing it in 2008.  So was the McCain/Palin campaign.

So no, the Tea Party isn't the magical group of "common sense centrists" or anything.  They are the fringe, batshit insane, John Birch Society, Sons of the South, crackpot lunatic fringe of the party, and they have been purchased lock, stock and barrel in order to attack President Obama.

Even worse, the goal here is to convince moderates that if they vote against President Obama, that maybe the Tea Party will go away and America will get back to functioning again.

All the scholars see the tea party as a mixed blessing for the Republican Party. They describe the movement as the de facto base of the party and cite its energizing force within the party as having contributed significantly to the turnout advantage that the GOP enjoyed in 2010.

But they underscore the risks of the movement pushing the party and its candidates too far to the right. Rae sees the movement and the GOP establishment as having developed “a complex and tense but increasingly interdependent relationship” and writes that the movement will “certainly leave a legacy on American politics, although it is still unclear exactly what that legacy will be.”

And that's the message Balz and others are pushing right now:  the only way to defuse the Tea Party is to dump President Obama as hard and as fast as possible.  It's a message that both the left and the right are happy to push for their own various purposes.

People need to remember that.