The tea party movement is just over a year old, and it’s good to see the press’s coverage mature along with it.
I’m not talking about spot news coverage of Sarah Palin’s weekend appearance in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nev., or the dozens of local news stories about impassioned activists that are sure to come along the 42-city tea party bus tour that ends up in Washington on April 15.
In general, the press has been slow to catch up to a force that’s been having a real influence on the public discourse for a while now. The Washington Post has lately beefed up its coverage of the movement, dedicating a national desk reporter to the beat and, as Greg Marx noted last week, bringing in my former colleague Dave Weigel from The Washington Independent to cover the story online.
In the last couple of days, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have found fresh angles and done on-the-ground reporting to help readers make sense of the movement.
The Journal weighed in today with page-one treatment of the tough political situation the tea party crowd faces as it members try to make the move from political activists to elected officials.
Mr. Meade’s experience goes to the heart of a debate roiling the nascent movement: Should it back fervent long shots who hew to its antigovernment views, or should it rally around more traditional candidates, even if they don’t perfectly reflect the movement’s distaste for incumbents, taxes and spending?
The question is being asked as homegrown candidates confront brute realities of politics: reluctant donors, limited party support, inexperienced staffers and the uphill fight against incumbents.
The piece makes clear just how important this challenge is. Lots of tea party activists are throwing their hat in the political ring, only to find just how hard it is to actually get elected and start changing things. As one strategist explains: “if the tea party has no electoral success, then the movement itself will fold.” Pretty simple.
The Journal could have done a bit better in backing up its piece with some data. These details about the “wave of newcomers” seeking public office don’t quite cut it:
There are now 617 more Republicans running in congressional primaries than ran in the last midterm election, in 2006, according to the Federal Elections Commission. That’s up 134%.
The number of Democrats in primaries remains almost unchanged from 2006, when the party gained 30 seats in the House and six in the Senate.
I’m guessing that because Democrats are in the majority, they’ve got fewer contested primaries, and therefore fewer primary candidates. Is that part of the explanation? Also, is that a comparison between people who’ve filed statements of candidacy in this cycle and those who actually ran in 2006? Or is it comparing the number of candidates this March with the number who had filed two years ago?
But the story nicely describes the current moment, and what’s at stake for the movement And there’s no shortage of anecdotes to show that the tea party movement has inspired a lot of candidates, and the belief among some organizers that they need to focus on picking out the winners.
Few House races are stirring more tea-party fervor than the sprawling 5th District in southern Virginia, where seven Republican candidates are battling for the right to take on freshman Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello.
Five of the Republicans claim allegiance to the tea-party mantle: two transplanted real-estate moguls, a pilot, a teacher and an Internet entrepreneur.“It’s a train wreck, no doubt about it,” says Mark Lloyd, founder of the Lynchburg Tea Party and a leading figure in the Virginia insurgency. “My proposal is we give everyone a tire iron and have them work it out in the parking lot.”
I suppose it's good that the coverage of the tea party has evolved as the movement has gone on. It's obviously a political force that deserves to be treated as such.
The problem I have is that the inherent mission of that political force is paradoxical: Tea partiers want less government, fewer taxes, and ... unemployment benefits? Increased funding for medicare? I get the "we hate bailouts" argument, I just don't understand how it's supposed to motivate people to rail against programs from which they're benefiting.
If you didn't like the bailouts (and believe me, very few people did) why protest the government rather than the companies that got themselves into the mess in the first place? And why would you object to the government regulating the companies that it did bail out, when a lack of regulation is almost universally blamed for the problem in the first place?
The tea party movement is an important one that deserves coverage. But it's also totally incoherent and nonsensical one, and said coverage should reflect that fact.
#1 Posted by Ian, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 03:41 PM
Ian,
That's just it - if you tried to distill a cohesive, unifying belief out of the coverage of the Tea Party - all you'd get is "We're angry at Government"
That's not to say there couldn't be a single unifying principle - but judging from the discontinuity on the protest signs, its just a buffet of political anger.
#2 Posted by murph, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 04:13 PM
You miss a significant point in understanding things about medicare and small government;
Most people in the Tea Party movement have paid into Medicare for decades - they simply want what they have been paying for.
Understandable, wouldn't you think?
#3 Posted by Bill SAnford, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 04:20 PM
Ian, I agree. It's one thing to cover a movement, another to do so without any critical analysis of that movement. It appears to me that these are people who are angry about our current economic and social crises, but who haven't taken the time to learn and understand why these crises happened and what the larger picture is.
I'm particularly interested in two quotes pulled for this piece:
" 'If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore,' Mr. Grimes said."
This really speaks, to me, of how divorced our political system has become from education and information, and from any concept of truth. I guess it is the unintended consequence of movements that sought to destabilize the idea that those in power construct the idea of truth. Now we have no truth, or a truth you can selectively choose, rather than multiple and co-existing truths, or even one institutional Truth.
I was also struck by the woman talking about why government was "put here." I'm really interested in this idea that government has some kind of purpose outside of the people by which it's created. And this idea that government is trying to run banks and insurance companies reveals that we have no concept anymore of what regulation means. I'm interested in hearing a little more about exactly what government was "put here" to do, especially when unemployment checks are ok but regulation of business, food safety, consumer safety, and environmental safety are out.
#4 Posted by laura k, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 04:21 PM
Bill, it's understandable IF you don't understand how medicare and social security work. Namely, that these aren't accounts that you're paying into, from which you'll eventually get back just what you paid in. It speaks, again, to our lack of understanding of what the social safety net is, and why these kinds of taxes are paid.
#5 Posted by laura k, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 04:25 PM
"You miss a significant point in understanding things about medicare and small government;
Most people in the Tea Party movement have paid into Medicare for decades - they simply want what they have been paying for.
Understandable, wouldn't you think? "
They've been ignoring the baby boom demographic catastrophe for decades. We've known for a long time that the Medicare was going to face a serious problem when the baby boomers started retiring, and they did nothing about it. They said "screw it, let the next generation worry about it," and now that a bunch of 20-somethings are demanding reform, they whine about it. If these people had their way, they'd bankrupt Medicare and Social Security both, because they're gonna die soon enough and then it won't be their problem.
And the funniest part is when they whine and complain about "generational theft" and "mortgaging away our grandchildren's future."
These people, who lauded Reagan while he tripled the national debt, are now whining about Obama's budget deficits. Hilarious.
#6 Posted by Hardrada, CJR on Mon 29 Mar 2010 at 05:33 PM
Critics of Tea Party people are ridiculed for opposing cuts in Medicare while supporting 'smaller government'. Perfectly legitimate.
Now I'd like more journalists to ask opponents of Bush's tax cuts, especially rich liberals, if they gave their own tax savings back to the federal government. I'd also like to know if any opponents of tax reduction or supporters of more governement spending take deductions on their own taxes.
I won't hold my breath; invariably, the other shoe never drops when journalists undertake these expeditions to oppose 'hypocrisy'. It just never even occurs to them to ask, which is why some of us think the problem is not even conscious bias, but a reflexive way of thinking.
#7 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Tue 30 Mar 2010 at 04:34 PM
Laura says: “Bill, it's understandable IF you don't understand how medicare and social security work. Namely, that these aren't accounts that you're paying into, from which you'll eventually get back just what you paid in.”
This statement is nonsensical. Medicare and Social Security constitute a pact between government and citizen whereby the citizen gets specified benefits in return for making agreed-upon payments. Of course anyone who has paid into these programs expect the government to uphold its share of the bargain. On what planet would this not be the case?
Need I remind you that Bush’s proposed overhaul of Social Security, which would have set up private accounts, was torpedoed by a Democratic Congress? The image of them standing up to applaud their own obstruction during the State of the Union address is indelible.
This whole “Tea Party is dumb/racist/violent” meme is a blatant attempt to smear voters who hold views different from those of the liberal MSM. The simple irony is that supporters of Obama's government expansion are every bit as ignorant as the Tea Partiers they decry.
#8 Posted by JLD, CJR on Tue 30 Mar 2010 at 08:28 PM