Notes of Concern…
…Jackson Blair
Title: Sane/Insane ?
I tend to read a lot during the week in preparation for writing Notes. A recent column by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, dealing generally with the Iowa Straw Poll in the Republican Party and more specifically with the “Tea Party,” features a statement attributed to another reporter:
I found this writing in the liberal NYC paper both humorous and thought provoking.
The “Tea Party” is viewed by many as a fringe or radical movement within the historic GOP. While trying to pass them off as inconsequential, out of touch, weird, radical…the press also credits (blames?) them for bringing the President of the United States to his knees in the recent House session dealing with the financial health of the country.
The press continues to label and deride this group, over and over again, in an attempt to diminish their influence and power, but the group just continues to show that, at least in Iowa and Washington DC, they command considerable attention and growing support.
So let us look at this phenomenon without prejudice for a moment. They kept the Democrats from raising taxes and forced them to reduce spending.
Sure.
The portion of Republican congress people who are labeled “Tea Party” is an incredibly small number in comparison with the over four hundred total members of Congress. So they must be pretty good at convincing their peers of their philosophical tenets. If not, then their influence is so out of proportion to their numbers that we would have to believe the rest of those who vote in the House, certainly more than 350 people, are simply easily led astray. We also have to believe that the President of the United States, the Vice President, the Minority Leader in the House and the Majority Leader in the Senate, a considerable group of people with a huge amount of power and influence, simply were no match for these “Tea Party” nuts.
Right.
In a multi-candidate free for all in Iowa they trounced the mainstream candidates.
The most vocal of them (Tea Party) currently serving in Washington refuse to ignore the views of the common people who elected them and instead risk their new- found government jobs to do what they said they would do.
Is there some sort of hidden agenda to always, but never directly, imply that farmers (a term of derision every four years?) simply do not represent the mood of the country? Is Iowa so easily written off as “just those Midwesterners doing their thing again?”
Within the context of political history no Republican in recent memory has won the nomination without winning either Iowa or the New Hampshire primary.
So perhaps attention needs to be paid.
I do not consider myself a member of the “Tea Party” inside the Republican Party. But I would have to be deaf and blind to ignore the results I saw recently in our sophisticated capital of Washington, DC and more recently in the cornfields of Iowa.
These people represent the inner thoughts, feelings, concerns and fears of a number of Americans, a more sizeable group than I thought before Iowa.
It appears that while one of “their own” will still have difficulty winning nomination for a presidential campaign they will be a force to be reckoned with for every other Republican who has a real chance at being nominated.
Just as President Obama could not ignore them, neither will the eventual nominee of the GOP be able to secure that nomination or win the general election without hearing the message they are sending.
What remains to be seen between now and the 2012 election is whether these people represent a wider, and growing group of people who are fed up with the status quo, or whether they are just as the press would have us believe, a fringe group of nut cases that reasonable men and women should disdain and ignore.
The opening shots of the 2012 race have been fired and we are off and running!
It is going to be a bumpy ride.
For further information: jacksonblair@gmail.com
