{"id":10928,"date":"2012-02-09T08:15:33","date_gmt":"2012-02-09T14:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/?p=10928"},"modified":"2012-02-09T06:17:07","modified_gmt":"2012-02-09T12:17:07","slug":"why-the-tea-party-exists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/?p=10928","title":{"rendered":"Why the Tea Party Exists"},"content":{"rendered":"

This piece<\/a> by Dan McLaughlin encapsulates why the Tea Party exists, and why it has to fight a willfully heedless Republican establishment, so well that I’m going to quote whopping great chunks from it:<\/p>\n

As anyone with a passing familiarity with Republican politics over the past four or five decades knows, conservative magazines and think tanks have been making detailed entitlement reform proposals for most of those years, and Republicans running for offices high and low have been running on platforms of reducing the size and cost of government for just as long. And then nothing happens.<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s why Congress\u2019 battles over the debt ceiling and related issues provide such a potent example. Basically all Republican Senators profess to be in favor of smaller government, and yet so few are willing to go to the barricades to make it a reality. Now, I\u2019m a realist \u2013 there are limits to how much we could expect even a completely united GOP to bring home as long as Obama is the President and Harry Reid the Senate Majority Leader. But the repeated spectacle of leading pundits and Beltway Republicans tut-tutting Boehner and company for even trying to use their leverage to exact real concessions is a sign that the message Republican voters have been sending is not getting through to everyone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(snip)<\/p>\n

The related point here \u2013 and one that says much about why RedState has put so much energy into intra-party primary battles rather than the production of white papers \u2013 is that personnel is policy. The ideas are already there; what is lacking is the necessary corps of people with the will to fight for them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(snip)<\/p>\n

The point of my essay was not to denounce anyone, but to explain the history and depth of the current popular distrust on the Right of leaders who seem unwilling to lead. The battle to restrain runaway government spending is so much smoke and mirrors unless the people who profess to support it in word are dedicated to it in deed. No wealth of position papers, endorsements and Power Point presentations can demonstrate that. Voters and activists who have figured this out are rightly skeptical of those who don\u2019t seem to \u201cget it\u201d. And they are more than willing to embrace flawed champions \u2013 even such a creature of the Beltway as Newt Gingrich \u2013 if they demonstrate the willingness to actually do something to stop the runaway train of federal spending. Every time some Beltway figure calls Newt or some Tea Party candidate crazy, voters think again, \u201che might actually be crazy enough to upset some applecarts to get things done.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n

(Hat tip: An American Housewife in London<\/a>, more about which anon.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This piece by Dan McLaughlin encapsulates why the Tea Party exists, and why it has to fight a willfully heedless Republican establishment, so well that I’m going to quote whopping great chunks from it: As anyone with a passing familiarity with Republican politics over the past four or five decades knows, conservative magazines and think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":17,"footnotes":""},"categories":[422,16,13,18,232],"tags":[2879,95,1165,2865,245,2875],"class_list":["post-10928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-economics","category-elections","category-republicans","category-welfare-state","tag-budget","tag-deficits","tag-newt-gingrich","tag-republicans","tag-tea-party","tag-welfare-state"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10928"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10935,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10928\/revisions\/10935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.battleswarmblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}