Affluent, liberal, and politically correct Marin County, California is probably not the first place you think of when it comes to Tea Party rallies, but that’s where I had my first encounter. Early last fall I walked into the Mill Valley Community Center to the sounds of the Pledge of Allegiance and life-sized cutouts of Ronald Regan, Abraham Lincoln, and Sarah Palin — clearly, I was in the right place.
I am an independent voter but I was interested to see and talk to this group of people that had been so maligned. Nancy Pelosi called the Tea Pary “astro turf” in an effort to marginalize them and the media seemed to only cover the gun-toting types. Were they crazy, bigoted, flash-in-the-pan extremists? A few were (one man wearing camo wanted to talk to me about eugenics — scary!), but for the most part they were a group of people that felt very strongly that America was on the wrong track. Overwhelmingly, their main concern was America’s debt.
I was surprised to see an athletic-looking sixteen year-old young man at the rally. It was a beautiful day and I asked him what he was doing at a Tea Party rally when the beach was just a few miles away. He told me he was trying to figure out “what was up” with his future. Also surprising: While most appreciated Sarah Palin for the focus she brought to America’s debt problem, the majority said they would not vote for her if she ran for president. There was something palpable in the room and it went beyond passion — these people were committed.
A few months later a group of Tea Party candidates got elected to Congress, and with the debt limit debate, they’ve changed the conversation in Washington.
The debt limit has been raised 74 times since 1962 — never with any conditions attached. Republican and Democratic administrations have raised the limit and Americans have not even blinked as our spending has spiraled out of control.
Generally, Deomocrats want to raise taxes to address the deficit and Republicans want to cut spending on social programs. Voters don’t like either of these options, a fact that Congress is well aware of, so Congress gets a new credit card with a higher limit and no one has to feel any pain — or lose their next election. America’s debt continues to mount and Republicans and Democrats blame each other because nothing has gotten done.
Enter the Tea Party.
They came to Washington with a mission to get America’s spending under control and to reduce debt. They were pummeled from the left and the right during the debt-limit debate but they stayed on message.
They continue to be attacked. John Kerry and the media suggested that America’s downgrade from a AAA to a AA credit rating was the Tea Party’s fault. While Standard & Poor’s cited Washington’s inability to work together to address the debt as one of the reasons for the downgrade, no one can doubt that the debt is the problem, not the Tea Party. Blaming the Tea Party for the downgrade is shooting the messenger. Plus, it may surprise you, but contrary to the media’s protrayal that the Tea Party segment of the Republican party was responsible for the no votes on the debt-limit bill, more Democrats voted no than Republicans, with a combined House and Senate total of 101 Democratic no votes and 85 Republican no votes.
The debt-limit deal is far from perfect: it doesn’t address the big drivers of our debt — Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, and, we have to think about tax reform. The Republicans didn’t get cuts in social services and the Democrats didn’t get tax increases, but the Tea Party got a conversation started — and the American people are beginning to listen.
*If you want to be part of the conversation call, write, or email your representatives and demand that they make the hard choices to get America’s fiscal house in order. Be prepared, if government does what it has to do to make us a strong nation again, we will all have to feel some pain — better a little pain now than a lot of pain later. Contact Elected Officials | USA.gov
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Well said. We all need to get involved in focusing our representatives to do their job of planning for a sustainable future.
Once again, your political articles offer simple explanations of what is going on–watching the news gets so confusing, that I often can’t always figure out exactly what’s happening beyond the fact that the world is in debt! Thank you for making these complex things easier to understand. Perhaps, because you have children, you’re good at explaining things, and it is a fortunate thing for me, because I find the very idea of politics absolutely daunting–they just go over my head.
It has been said that statecraft is soulcraft. It seems that the souls in our country do not often agree when it comes to the “social issues”, wars or even education. While i dont give us much hope that we will ever have unity in my lifetime on what we should spend money on, i do believe that we will unify over balancing the budget. People just know from the deepest part of there soul that even though they might like spending more on certain programs that we just cant until we have our credit card paid off. So the conservatives will just have to agree to quit spending so much on war and the liberals will have to quit bailing out bankrupt businesses and mortgages until we get our financial house in order. I dont think anyone who voted for the current administration would have thought that we would have increased spending so dramatically as we have. while many in America agree with President Obama’s view on social issues they deep deep down know that whoever is in the White House the next four years must get us out of debt and must stop the red ink in the federal treasury. Financial boundaries many times help our souls make the tough decisions!