Wake Up and Smell the Tea

Barack Obama, who campaigned on the promise of uniting America, can now claim the mantle as the most divisive president in U.S. history.  He has become the Demonizer-In-Chief, assaulting big business, health insurers, corporate jet owners, the wealthy, credit rating agencies and everyone else who dares to stand against his bankrupt agenda.

In recent days, the president has reserved some of his harshest verbal venom for the Tea Party, blaming the nascent movement for the Washington wrangling that ended with a debt deal no one liked.  Of course, the Obama Amen Chorus in the media and within the Democrat Party bared their fangs in support the president.

Massachusetts's Sen. John Kerry sunk his dental implants in the Tea Party, laying the blame for the Standard & Poor's credit downgrade at the feet of the 87 freshmen GOP Congressmen who adhered toTea Party principles in the debt debate.

Obama's political hatchet man David Axelrod seconded Kerry's assessment, calling the credit agency's action a "Tea Party downgrade."  Democrats were just getting warmed up when the mainstream media stepped into the fray with incendiary language.

David Gregory on television's "Meet the Press" program accused the Tea Party of "holding the process hostage" in  referring to the debt negotiations.  New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman characterized the Tea Party as the "Hezbollah faction" of the GOP.

Figuring his colleagues hadn't gone far enough in exposing their bias, fellow columnist Joe Nocera wrote in The Times that the Tea Party had "waged Jihad on America."  Howard Dean, the Democrat Party's left wing loon, infamously branded the movement "racist."

Democrats and their allies in the media have made the Tea Party Public Enemy No. 1 for one reason:  they are scared to death that what started as a loosely knit revolution against Obama's perilous penchant for spending will mushroom into an landslide rejection of the president next November.

Democratic pollster Rasmussen's research underscores the issue for Obama and his party.  It released results this month that showed "42% of all likely U.S. voters believe the average Tea Party member has a better understanding of problems America faces, while 34% think the average member of Congress is more clued in." 

In fact, the Tea Party isn't a a traditional political party, but a fractious federation of like-minded individuals.  A poll conducted by CNN/Opinion Research painted a more favorable picture of Tea Party members than the one framed by the media and Democrats.

The research found that three-fourths of those who identified themselves as Tea Party members had attended college, compared to 54 percent of the public at large.  Six in ten were male.  More than half live in rural America.  Most don't actively support the party, but often endorse the Tea Party views.

That hardly is the profile of a "terrorist."

In recent days, Democrats have ratcheted up the anti-Tea Party rhetoric in hopes of shielding the president from the blame he deserves for the debt debacle that ended with the U.S. losing its AAA credit rating for the first time in 70 years, despite Obama's repeated lie that raising the debt ceiling was the only way to avoid a downgrade.

No wonder the president's credibility is deteriorating faster than a crippled Japanese nuclear plant.

Obama got his wish, a debt deal that lifted the moratorium on borrowing.  He cannot legitimately finger the Tea Party or its Congressional supporters for the stock market crash and credit downgrade that happened AFTER the bipartisan agreement was signed into law by the president.   

For months, the media and Obama clamored for a debt compromise.  They misread the American public, thinking that voters preferred compromise over substance.  What the electorate wanted was a solution to reclaiming the nation's fiscal footing, not some squishy deal that leaves the debt issue unsettled for 10 more years.

Voters send people to Washington to represent their views.  Many inside the Beltway believe that the notion of a representative government is a quaint idea not worth preserving.  They salivate after compromise, but only as long as negotiations end up with a lopsided agreement they favor. 

Which brings us back to the Tea Party.  The reason the movement fired the imagination of the voters was its principled stand against taxes, big government and wanton spending.  The electorate was tired of voting for the same old political crowd that promised reform and then promptly changed their stripes the minute they set foot in the Capitol. 

Yet when Tea Party backed Congressmen and women balked at talk of raising taxes to reduce the deficit, the media and the Democrat Party acted outraged.  In their skewed view, principles should be sacrificed in the name of compromise.  That kind of thinking is what led to the current fiscal dysfunction in Washington. 

Despite its grassroots origin, the Tea Party movement has proven effective at raising the level of dissatisfaction with Obama's policies.  That's what bothers the president and the Democrats most.  They want to control the political message by silencing voices of dissent through intimidation, dehumanization and disinformation.   

The Big Bad Tea Party has a huge target on its back because it won't bend to Obama's political will.  Instead of reaching out to his critics, the president prefers to divide the nation with labels.  Name calling is no hallmark of leadership.  It is the stock-and-trade of political cowards.