Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Brit Hume Has About One of the Best Takes on the Tea Party Out There

Brit Hume Has About One of the Best Takes on the Tea Party Out There:
Fox News’ Brit Hume has about one of the fairest assessments of the tea party out there. Hume explains why the tea party is going to extraordinary lengths to attempt to roll back government, and why that makes the tea party different from establishment Republicans.
Hume argued that tea party supporters are using an unconventional approach because the GOP has “utterly failed” to restrain the growth of government:
“Veteran political observers on both the left and right are still trying to figure out what the House Tea Party caucus and its Senate pied piper Ted Cruz were thinking when they insisted on using the threat of a government shutdown to defund ObamaCare. 
“It was a hopeless strategy that has not only failed in its stated goal, but helped send the Republican Party to its lowest favorability ratings ever. 
“In conventional terms, it seems inexplicable, but Senator Cruz and his adherents do not view things in conventional terms. They look back over the past half-century, including the supposedly golden era of Ronald Reagan, and see the uninterrupted forward march of the American left. Entitlement spending never stopped growing. The regulatory state continued to expand. The national debt grew and grew and finally in the Obama years, exploded. They see an American population becoming unrecognizable from the free and self-reliant people they thought they knew. And they see the Republican Party as having utterly failed to stop the drift toward an unfree nation supervised by an overweening and bloated bureaucracy. They are not interested in Republican policies that merely slow the growth of this leviathan. They want to stop it and reverse it. And they want to show their supporters they’ll try anything to bring that about. 
“And if some of those things turn out to be reckless and doomed, well so be it.”
Ultimately, the tea party stands for a cohesive and understandable set of demands, such as fiscal responsibility and limited government; but it is using the imagery and language of protest to attempt to win elections. This served a purpose when the tea party was all about protesting ObamaCare and the stimulus; but winning elections and then governing is a totally separate matter.
Most voters expect those who are elected to serve in the government to govern, for right or wrong, and not simply to protest against things. The tea party needs to articulate better the positive things it is for: like middle class prosperity, more equality in a free economy, and what members’ ideal of fairness is.
The tea party may even want to consider changing its imagery from one based on protest to one based on restoring good government. Because, ultimately, people will continue to confuse tea party members with “anarchists” and call them “anti-government” unless they can present themselves, and their arguments, in a more understandable way to moderate and pragmatist voters.
That being said, Brit Hume really nails why many Americans feel like the government is completely out-of-control and needs not only to be reined in, but rolled back. It’s definitely worth considering.
The post Brit Hume Has About One of the Best Takes on the Tea Party Out There appeared first on Independent Journal Review.