NationalJournal.com last month sat down with Charlie Cook to talk about how Democrats can improve their image with voters, particularly those who identify with the Tea Party movement.Cook gave his assessment of the job Obama has done so far and predicted where Obama’s miscalculations might have the most consequences on the election map. Edited excerpts follow.

NJ: How seriously should we be taking the Tea Party movement?

Cook: Well I think in politics in general and particularly in midterm elections, intensity matters. And whether a movement is constituted by tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people or not, if it’s a sizable enough group with enough intensity, they can make a huge impact.

And I think back in July and August during the town meetings, there was an enormous amount of intensity and it was really sort of the early warning signal that something was going horribly wrong for the president and Democrats in Congress, to build up that kind of intensity of opposition so early on and creating a political environment which a lot of Democratic members of Congress had to be looking at their $173,000 a year pay stubs and thinking, “Gosh, this isn’t nearly enough money to put up with this kind of abuse.” And they did have abused heaped on them.

But I think the Democratic problems and the president’s problems, they, by a factor of a hundred, go beyond the Tea Party movement, but the Tea Party movement is sort of the tip of the sword.

NJ: But the Tea Party movement only represents a small part of the voting population, right?

Cook: It’s hard to nail down exactly what percentage they are, but I don’t think they constitute a majority of conservatives, a majority of Republicans or a majority of independents. But the thing is, they did break through…. I think opposition might have come to a slower boil had it not been for the Tea Party movement that moved it right up to the front pages and some of the lead stories on the evening newscast.

NJ: Many polls have shown that people trust themselves more than they trust the government to improve their lives. Do you think this sentiment is at an unprecedented level?

Cook: I think Americans, by their nature, are distrustful of “big” — whether it’s big government or big labor, we’re distrustful of “big.” And it does go in cycles. And at the time of Barack Obama’s election to the presidency, when you asked the age-old polling question, “Do you think the government should do more to address people’s problems, or do you think government is trying to take on too many things?” It wasn’t an overwhelming majority, but it was a majority who thought the government should do more.

But those numbers are reversed. More than reversed. And I think probably TARP, which happened before President Obama took office, but TARP followed by some of the bailouts, the takeovers, the stimulus package…. And then the scope and size and some of the fear that came out of cap-and-trade and health care, it just sort of built and built and built up.

But the thing is I think people do have a natural skepticism of what government is capable of doing and they had seen the reach of government expand enormously since Labor Day of 2008. And I also think, though, that the need for that was probably not well articulated, either by President Bush in the old regime, or by President Obama. I think there was probably a fear of alarming an already terrified American people.

NJ: If Obama has a communications problem as you suggest, then what should he do to reach out to the American people? Should he try to appear more populist?

Cook: I sort of reject the notion that there is a communications problem with President Obama. I think it’s just fundamental, total miscalculations from the very, very beginning. Of proportions comparable to President George W. Bush’s decision to go into Iraq. While Bush went, “We’re going to go after Afghanistan as a reaction to 9/11,” and then just pretty soon got distracted and obsessed with going into Iraq with varying rationalizations that sort of evolved over time.

This was a case where I think the White House people could see, look at the president, the White House and congressional Democrats as sort of checking the box on stimulus, but found that kind of boring, and moved on to health care and cap-and-trade. And the thing is, Democrats piled all this cotton candy and pork and junk and pet projects into it, so it discredited the stimulus package in the minds of a lot of voters and at the same time, it wasn’t big enough. It was totally insufficient, yet they wanted to keep it under a trillion dollars because they didn’t want to spend a lot of political capital on a really big stimulus package because they wanted to save it for cap-and-trade and health care. And so we start off with the original sin of a very imperfect and inadequate economic stimulus package and then moving off the economy almost entirely going into cap-and-trade and health care.

And then when unemployment numbers started proving to be much, much tougher and it started becoming more clear that the stimulus package hadn’t worked properly, they just kept plowing ahead on health care. And this isn’t a communications problem. This is a reality problem. And I think they just made some grave miscalculations and as it became more clear that they had screwed up, they just kept doubling down their bet.

And so I think, no, this is one of the biggest miscalculations that we’ve seen in modern political history.

NJ: What do Democrats have to do to correct this?

Cook: I’ve spent the last couple of days talking to some of the brightest Democrats in the party that are not in the White House. And it’s very hard to come up with a scenario where Democrats don’t lose the House. It’s very hard. Are the seats there right this second? No. But we’re on a trajectory on the House turning over….

There are nine months, certainly things could happen, but the odds of unemployment being below 9 percent are minimal by the time of this election. We’re probably going to have a year of basically, more or less, 10 percent unemployment, which hasn’t happened since the Great Depression. I mean, in fact, in an even-numbered year there’s only been one month of double-digit unemployment in the post-War era. One month. And now we’re going to have probably about a year.

NJ: Name some places where Democrats should be focusing their energy, states or districts where it’s really going to be a tough sell but you think that its worth making.

Cook: Well when a Democratic Senate candidates loses Barney Frank’s district and loses Massachusetts, I think it raises a legitimate question of what is safe — not what’s in danger, but what is safe.

But if you were going to build a profile of where is it going to be absolutely the worst for Democrats, I would say the Deep South, Old South, the border south, states and districts with large small-town and rural populations, maybe lower percentages of college graduates — in other words, sort of yuppie types. I would say fewer transplants from the north. Places where Obama did worse than John Kerry did in the general election.

And there’s sort of like a Nike swoosh, eastern Ohio, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, down and across Tennessee, across the south and all the way to Oklahoma that Obama — I mean, 70 percent of the counties in America, Barack Obama did much better than John Kerry, but there is a sort of a swoosh of counties where Obama underperformed John Kerry — and let’s face it, John Kerry wasn’t exactly a son of the South — so that was like particularly bad.

Or you could look at, where did Obama lose to Hillary Clinton. A lot of working class white areas, that sort of thing. I mean I think those are going to be sort of the ground zero states and districts where it’s going to be bad. But I don’t know that there are many places that aren’t going to be bad, I mean, that are going to be good….

The thing that I think a lot of Democratic strategists are really concerned about is that some of these districts are going to be gone for a generation or more. I mean, they’re not coming back. They’re ones that had somehow managed to hang on in Democratic hands even after the Democratic Party fell out of favor in a lot of the South. But once they slip away, I’m not sure they’re coming back.

NJ: Are there areas where you might see a Republican nominee who is too far to the right?

Cook: Where you have Republican incumbents who may have voted for TARP, you’re going to have some potential probleme spots. Part of it is, we’re reaching here a little bit. Because, yes, the Republican Party, they’ve got some huge brand problems, where their brand got badly damaged during the eight years of President Bush and the six years the Republicans had the majority in Congress…. But if I had a choice of the Republican Party’s problems right now or the Democratic Party’s problems, I think you could triple the Republican Party’s problems and I’d still rather have their problems than the problems facing Democrats.

By Stephanie Nelson (Contact) | Andalusia Star-News

Published Saturday, February 20, 2010

There is a movement in Covington County calling for government change based on “plain ol’ common sense,” organized by two grassroots groups, also known as tea parties, in Florala and Andalusia.

According to members, the groups, while not connected to each other, share a common goal – to restore the country’s “of the people, by the people and for the people” mentality in government.

Last week, nearly 200 residents attended Florala’s meeting, organized by Ken Hicks, Kermit George and Frank Pierce. Don Gaines, organizer of Andalusia’s Tea Party Patriots of Covington County, said more than 70 attended Thursday’s meeting at the Andalusia American Legion.

“I decided that like most people, I’m just fed up with the way our government is working,” Hicks said. “I have a sign in my yard that says it, ‘Wake up America. They’re destroying our country. Let’s vote them out.’”

“Our group just wants to see a common sense approach applied to government,” he said. “We all know you have to spend money for certain things, but some of those thing they spend money is ridiculous. For us, it’s not about party lines – we think there should be term limits for Congress and for the Senate. Our forefathers didn’t set things up this way to for them to have a 40- or 50-year career. We don’t need parties – Democrat, Republic, Independent, whatever.

“We need people to do what they say they’re going to do and take care of our country,” he said.

Gaines said their next meetings set are March 11 and April 8 at 6 p.m. at the American Legion.

Pete Riehm, executive director of the Common Sense Campaign, said his Mobile-based organization has helped establish chapters in eight Alabama counties – including Covington.

“What it boils down to is that our members want to see our constitution restored,” Riehm said. “We are a great grassroots organization. We are not a political party. We are a movement to give a voice to ‘We the people.’ There are Americans who think it’s time for a change, and we’re working to change as many faces in Congress as possible – doesn’t matter if they’re a Democrat or Republican.”

Friday a similar meeting was scheduled at the Wing Volunteer Fire Department.

“It’s so exciting to see the people stand up and run with it,” Riehm said of the meeting. “This meeting was set up in the exact way a grassroots movement intends. The fire chief attended a meeting last week, heard what we’re about and said he needed for the people in his community to hear about it.

“It all comes down to demanding honest candidates that will uphold our constitution,” he said. “And more and more people are demanding it.”

Florala resident Marion Causey said when he heard about the Florala meeting, he knew he had to be there.

“The people in Washington think we owe them,” Causey said.

“They forget they work for us. The freedoms that we have are being taken away. It’s time for the American citizens to wake up and get our government back to the way it should be.”

For more information about the local tea party movement, visit teapartypatriots.org or commonsensecampaign.org

Tea, anyone?
The independent-bent thirst for limited government is more than just some marginalized shouting

By Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie
Reason magazine and Reason.com

POSTED: 10:11 a.m. HST, Feb 09, 2010

(Single Page View) | Return to Paginated View
So where were you during the great Civil War of 2009?
What, you don’t remember it?
Six months ago, you may dimly recall, the nation’s elite guardians of political discourse were sounding the alarm about what New York Times bloviator Frank Rich described as “the simmering undertone of violence in our politics” that “keeps getting darker.” The Southern Poverty Law Center warned that “the sounds of violence are growing louder.” The source of the threat was clear: “brownshirt”-style “street thugs” protesting President Barack Obama’s health care policies, according to historian Rick Perlstein.
Angry voters shouting questions at congressional town hall meetings, the emerging consensus agreed last August, were speaking less out of genuine self-interest than from what Paul Krugman described as “the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the ‘birther’ movement.” Evidence for this cutting-edge sociological explanation was furnished by liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, who died four decades ago. Still, Hofstadter’s early-1960s warning of the “paranoid style” and rampant anti-intellectualism of right-wing politics was being used by a club by pundits to describe the people who disagreed with them. The Tea Party movement was an atavistic last gasp from the same marginalized white crazies who brought us everything from the John Birch Society to Timothy McVeigh.
What a difference a few elections make. Now that Republican Scott Brown has single-handedly punctured the Democrats’ supermajority and likely scuppered the party’s health care bill by winning Teddy Kennedy’s old Senate seat in a 3-to-1 Democratic state, coverage of the Tea Party movement has dropped the panicky warnings of imminent violence and morphed into something approaching a genuine, if belated and condescending, curiosity. Unless your name is Keith Olbermann, it’s hard to sustain the narrative of racist white nutjobs in a state that elected Barack Hussein Obama by 26 percentage points. No matter how crazy-sounding would-be Tea Party spokesmen can sound — and there was ample Obama-birth-certificate goofiness at this past weekend’s self-styled Tea Party convention in Nashville — the disaffection that has fueled its rise is verging on the mainstream.
As two journalists who covered the huge Sept. 12 Tea Party march on Washington, and as two champions of limited government who have long studied the gap between Americans’ fiscal conservatism and their governments’ fiscal recklessness, we’d like to assist our newly curious colleagues in the legacy media in understanding this strange and uncomfortable apparition.
The first thing to note is that the Scott Brown election was, if anything, a lagging indicator. Beginning at least last May, when California voters overwhelmingly rejected a series of budget-juryrigging ballot measures supported by the Golden State’s entire political class, American voters during this long and unhappy season of fatcat bailouts and seven-figure job losses have taken every available opportunity to give their elected leaders the collective finger. Last summer’s town hall meetings, which despite all the media hyperventilation weren’t statistically violent in the least, were more than anything else predictable: If the federal government goes on an unprecedented spending binge after the new president campaigned on a “net spending cut,” and then starts talking about overhauling health care and jacking up the costs of energy consumption, yeah, those constituency discussions might get a little heated.
Underlying this intense and growing alienation is a fact that no demonization of individual Tea Party protesters can sweep aside: Ever since then-President George W. Bush went on live national TV in September 2008 to declare that “under normal circumstances” he was “a strong believer in free enterprise,” the economic policies favored by Official Washington have been tremendously unpopular.
By a count of 56 percent to 30 percent, Americans think the bank bailouts were a bad idea, according to a January survey by Rasmussen Reports. Even more — 73 percent — dislike the auto bailouts, a number that is the exact inverse of what Rasmussen describes as the “political class,” who were 73 percent in favor. That disconnect is not an outlier.
According to a January ABC News/Washington Post poll, 58 percent of Americans prefer “smaller government with fewer services,” compared to 38 percent who favor “larger government with more services.” A Gallup poll from last September has 57 percent of Americans believing that the government is doing too much with the economy.
This makes sense if you think about it for more than two seconds. Fiscal conservatism was last spotted in Washington during the 1990s, which also happened to coincide with a fondly remembered boom. Then George W. Bush jacked up spending at rates not seen since his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson bestrode the economy like a deficit-generating Colossus, and Barack Obama decided to see his predecessor’s irresponsibility and raise it up a notch. Voters who prefer government to live within its means, and who favor the type of American capitalism that allows deserving companies to fail rather than become wards of the state, have had nowhere to turn for more than a decade.
This goes a long way to explain why the Tea Party is showing up in some polls as more popular than the Republican Party. Though the grassroots movement is definitely a right-of-center phenomenon, many of the protestors we spoke with back at the Sept. 12 march in Washington were disgusted with the GOP, somewhat embarrassed that they didn’t give Bush a harder time, and very eager to thwart any attempt to convert this powerful new tendency into just another get-out-the-vote operation for the Republican Party.
Even within the self-described Tea Party movement there have been all kinds of factionalization, contests for power, and mutual recriminations over obscure sleights. To the consternation of many interpreters, the Tea Party is not behaving like a top-down political organization at all, but rather a series of loosely connected local groups ready to fall in — or fall out — at a moment’s notice. This weekend’s pricey proceedings in Nashville were condemned by many Tea Party loyalists long before Sarah Palin gave her odd and hugely publicized speech.
But it would be a mistake to confuse organizational incoherence — not to mention a hysterical, off-putting tendency to portray the president as some kind of totalitarian jackal — with political impotence. Not only are Tea Party activists materially affecting things as big as Scott Brown’s election and as little as a Virginia state vote to outlaw health insurance mandates, but their broad and relentless critique of runaway government is, if anything, more popular than the movement itself.
Judging by President Obama’s State of the Union address, this is a message that just isn’t getting through to the White House. In a season where Republican governors have won in Virginia and New Jersey, where a third-party conservative came incredibly close to winning a hotly contested House district in upstate New York, the president faced the electorate and promised a 6 percent education hike and bullet-train projects to nowhere. His gargantuan $3.8 trillion proposed budget, despite coming wrapped in rhetoric about how it would be “a terrible mistake to borrow against our children’s future to pay our way today,” makes precisely that mistake, racking up a mind-blowing $1.56 trillion in debt.
As long as there are politicians in both parties who preach “fiscal responsibility” while delivering the opposite, who “punish” bad banks by saying mean things about them while handing over billions, and who treat capitalism as a process that begins with government benevolence, there will be both a Tea Party movement and broader political tendency underneath it. Americans have ridden these two worn-out husks of political parties since the 19th century; it’s no wonder that voters are defecting in droves.
Independent voters are the one part of the electorate that is growing like the stock market used to way back a decade ago. A recent poll of Arizona voters found that both the Democrats and the Republicans were shedding voters like rats abandoning a sinking ship. Nearly one-third of Grand Canyon State voters were considering a switch to independent status, which is pretty much what’s happening in every state in the country. The politicians — and parties — that recognize that Americans are sick of the fiscal doubletalk and really do want a government that reflects their limited government sensibilities will do just fine. The others will be looking for work in a country where jobs are hard to find thanks to promiscuous government intervention in every part of our lives.
———

Matt Welch ()matt.welch@reason.com is editor in chief of Reason magazine; Nick Gillespie ()gillespie@reason.com is editor of Reason.tv and Reason.com.So where were you during the great Civil War of 2009?

What, you don’t remember it?

Six months ago, you may dimly recall, the nation’s elite guardians of political discourse were sounding the alarm about what New York Times bloviator Frank Rich described as “the simmering undertone of violence in our politics” that “keeps getting darker.” The Southern Poverty Law Center warned that “the sounds of violence are growing louder.” The source of the threat was clear: “brownshirt”-style “street thugs” protesting President Barack Obama’s health care policies, according to historian Rick Perlstein.

Angry voters shouting questions at congressional town hall meetings, the emerging consensus agreed last August, were speaking less out of genuine self-interest than from what Paul Krugman described as “the same cultural and racial anxiety that’s behind the ‘birther’ movement.” Evidence for this cutting-edge sociological explanation was furnished by liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, who died four decades ago. Still, Hofstadter’s early-1960s warning of the “paranoid style” and rampant anti-intellectualism of right-wing politics was being used by a club by pundits to describe the people who disagreed with them. The Tea Party movement was an atavistic last gasp from the same marginalized white crazies who brought us everything from the John Birch Society to Timothy McVeigh.

What a difference a few elections make. Now that Republican Scott Brown has single-handedly punctured the Democrats’ supermajority and likely scuppered the party’s health care bill by winning Teddy Kennedy’s old Senate seat in a 3-to-1 Democratic state, coverage of the Tea Party movement has dropped the panicky warnings of imminent violence and morphed into something approaching a genuine, if belated and condescending, curiosity. Unless your name is Keith Olbermann, it’s hard to sustain the narrative of racist white nutjobs in a state that elected Barack Hussein Obama by 26 percentage points. No matter how crazy-sounding would-be Tea Party spokesmen can sound — and there was ample Obama-birth-certificate goofiness at this past weekend’s self-styled Tea Party convention in Nashville — the disaffection that has fueled its rise is verging on the mainstream.

As two journalists who covered the huge Sept. 12 Tea Party march on Washington, and as two champions of limited government who have long studied the gap between Americans’ fiscal conservatism and their governments’ fiscal recklessness, we’d like to assist our newly curious colleagues in the legacy media in understanding this strange and uncomfortable apparition.

The first thing to note is that the Scott Brown election was, if anything, a lagging indicator. Beginning at least last May, when California voters overwhelmingly rejected a series of budget-juryrigging ballot measures supported by the Golden State’s entire political class, American voters during this long and unhappy season of fatcat bailouts and seven-figure job losses have taken every available opportunity to give their elected leaders the collective finger. Last summer’s town hall meetings, which despite all the media hyperventilation weren’t statistically violent in the least, were more than anything else predictable: If the federal government goes on an unprecedented spending binge after the new president campaigned on a “net spending cut,” and then starts talking about overhauling health care and jacking up the costs of energy consumption, yeah, those constituency discussions might get a little heated.

Underlying this intense and growing alienation is a fact that no demonization of individual Tea Party protesters can sweep aside: Ever since then-President George W. Bush went on live national TV in September 2008 to declare that “under normal circumstances” he was “a strong believer in free enterprise,” the economic policies favored by Official Washington have been tremendously unpopular.

By a count of 56 percent to 30 percent, Americans think the bank bailouts were a bad idea, according to a January survey by Rasmussen Reports. Even more — 73 percent — dislike the auto bailouts, a number that is the exact inverse of what Rasmussen describes as the “political class,” who were 73 percent in favor. That disconnect is not an outlier.

According to a January ABC News/Washington Post poll, 58 percent of Americans prefer “smaller government with fewer services,” compared to 38 percent who favor “larger government with more services.” A Gallup poll from last September has 57 percent of Americans believing that the government is doing too much with the economy.

This makes sense if you think about it for more than two seconds. Fiscal conservatism was last spotted in Washington during the 1990s, which also happened to coincide with a fondly remembered boom. Then George W. Bush jacked up spending at rates not seen since his fellow Texan Lyndon Johnson bestrode the economy like a deficit-generating Colossus, and Barack Obama decided to see his predecessor’s irresponsibility and raise it up a notch. Voters who prefer government to live within its means, and who favor the type of American capitalism that allows deserving companies to fail rather than become wards of the state, have had nowhere to turn for more than a decade.

This goes a long way to explain why the Tea Party is showing up in some polls as more popular than the Republican Party. Though the grassroots movement is definitely a right-of-center phenomenon, many of the protestors we spoke with back at the Sept. 12 march in Washington were disgusted with the GOP, somewhat embarrassed that they didn’t give Bush a harder time, and very eager to thwart any attempt to convert this powerful new tendency into just another get-out-the-vote operation for the Republican Party.

Even within the self-described Tea Party movement there have been all kinds of factionalization, contests for power, and mutual recriminations over obscure sleights. To the consternation of many interpreters, the Tea Party is not behaving like a top-down political organization at all, but rather a series of loosely connected local groups ready to fall in — or fall out — at a moment’s notice. This weekend’s pricey proceedings in Nashville were condemned by many Tea Party loyalists long before Sarah Palin gave her odd and hugely publicized speech.

But it would be a mistake to confuse organizational incoherence — not to mention a hysterical, off-putting tendency to portray the president as some kind of totalitarian jackal — with political impotence. Not only are Tea Party activists materially affecting things as big as Scott Brown’s election and as little as a Virginia state vote to outlaw health insurance mandates, but their broad and relentless critique of runaway government is, if anything, more popular than the movement itself.

Judging by President Obama’s State of the Union address, this is a message that just isn’t getting through to the White House. In a season where Republican governors have won in Virginia and New Jersey, where a third-party conservative came incredibly close to winning a hotly contested House district in upstate New York, the president faced the electorate and promised a 6 percent education hike and bullet-train projects to nowhere. His gargantuan $3.8 trillion proposed budget, despite coming wrapped in rhetoric about how it would be “a terrible mistake to borrow against our children’s future to pay our way today,” makes precisely that mistake, racking up a mind-blowing $1.56 trillion in debt.

As long as there are politicians in both parties who preach “fiscal responsibility” while delivering the opposite, who “punish” bad banks by saying mean things about them while handing over billions, and who treat capitalism as a process that begins with government benevolence, there will be both a Tea Party movement and broader political tendency underneath it. Americans have ridden these two worn-out husks of political parties since the 19th century; it’s no wonder that voters are defecting in droves.

Independent voters are the one part of the electorate that is growing like the stock market used to way back a decade ago. A recent poll of Arizona voters found that both the Democrats and the Republicans were shedding voters like rats abandoning a sinking ship. Nearly one-third of Grand Canyon State voters were considering a switch to independent status, which is pretty much what’s happening in every state in the country. The politicians — and parties — that recognize that Americans are sick of the fiscal doubletalk and really do want a government that reflects their limited government sensibilities will do just fine. The others will be looking for work in a country where jobs are hard to find thanks to promiscuous government intervention in every part of our lives.

The Tea Parties Are United in Favor of Limited, Responsible Government
By Mark Davis

On April 15 at Dallas City Hall, I looked out over a sea of attendees at one of several national gatherings that launched the Tea Party movement.

As the throng dissipated that night, messages of liberty and fiscal responsibility still ringing sweetly in their ears, the shared question was: Will this ball keep rolling? Or will it simply wane into pleasant nostalgia, a fading memory of a one-day pushback against out-of-control government?

Almost a year later, the ball still rolls. The Tea Party movement is one of the most noteworthy grassroots uprisings in recent American political history. And one of the most misunderstood.

So as this year unfolds toward an election day that will show how much nationwide clout the movement can muster, let’s review what Tea Party passions are – and what they are not.

The Tea Party movement is not a nascent third party. Most tea partiers know that splitting the voters looking for less spending and lower taxes is a guarantee of more domination by Democrats with no interest in either.

The Tea Party movement is not “anti-tax.” It is against confiscatory taxes, outlandish taxes, excessive taxes – choose your adjective. But this “anti-tax” nonsense is the same kind of obnoxious slander as calling people who favor strong borders “anti-immigration.”

The Tea Party movement is not driven by social conservatism. That doesn’t mean you won’t find plenty of tea partiers who are devout advocates of protecting the unborn and traditional marriage – it’s just that the Tea Party engine is driven first and foremost by a desire to return government to its proper constitutional limits and run it with a lot less money. Anyone driven by that passion is welcome in any roomful of tea partiers, no matter what views they may hold about God and gays.

That is, by the way, part of why the movement is so strong. If it were to adopt some litmus tests for admittedly important social issues, it would see its ranks dwindle mightily. Electing people to bring back fiscal sanity in 2010 and 2012 will require the help of millions of voters who may be centrist, libertarian or even socially liberal. How do you think Scott Brown won in Massachusetts?

Finally, the Tea Party movement is not some subculture of bug-eyed lunatics. Any political movement is going to have some characters ranging from colorful to occasionally unhinged, but the insulting tone of much of the coverage of the movement would have you believe that these are fringe extremists who could snap at any moment.

Well, the truth is, they have snapped already. The sound we are hearing is the proverbial camel’s back breaking after years of reckless spending, punitive taxation and usurpations of liberty that have crippled every citizen’s opportunity to enjoy the full promise of what America is supposed to be about: freedom and opportunity, with the least government necessary to maintain an ordered society.

The people drifting toward the Tea Party movement are not extreme. They are, in fact, fighting extremism – the extremism that has brought us a government that takes far too much, spends far too much and runs our lives far too much.

At long last, people who might disagree on a number of other things are uniting in a fight for strong but limited government, run responsibly and frugally. It took Democrats and Republicans to create this mess, and entrenched members of both parties could soon find themselves back in the private sector if the enthusiasm of tea parties and town halls carries all the way to the November elections.

With participants from so many walks of life, and no rigid structure or leadership, it can be a challenge to define exactly what the Tea Party movement is. But I’ll tell you one more thing that it is not: It is not going away.

Mark Davis is a columnist for the Dallas Morning News. The Mark Davis Show is heard weekdays nationwide on the ABC Radio Network. His e-mail address is mdavis@wbap.com.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — No body ever said tea parties have to be pretty.

At least, not the kind of tea party gathered here in the thumping heart of gaudy country music.

These people have come from all across the nation for the first National Tea Party Convention to denounce not just President Obama and the Democrats, but Republicans and all of Washington for getting infected with the same voracious and parasitic plague spawned by big-government liberalism.

Folks here are loud and they are proud.

Already, the infant organization called Tea Party Nation has been riven by infighting, dogged by accusations of impropriety and can, at best, point to just one successful candidate.

All of this has been catnip for the battalion of liberal reporters eagerly covering every disjointed mishap of this free-wheeling and unorganizable band of rebels.

But it would be wrong to think tea partiers have not had any successes.

Indeed, they alone are responsible for killing the Democratic government health-care scheme.

Tea partiers sounded the alarm and stormed town-hall meetings.

It was only after the spontaneous, rogue wave got rolling that Republicans woke up and answered the call.

Naturally, at a tea party like this, any fine china is going to get broken.

And if there is a party that has too much fine china, it’s the GOP.

Tea partiers have saved their most ferocious attacks for those in the Republican establishment for allowing the “conservative” party to fall under the spell of bigger government.

They are wrenching the mantle of conservatism from the undeserving hands of the GOP and making them earn it back.

“I am not an ideologue,” protested President Obama at a gathering with Republican House members last week. Perhaps, but he does have a tenacious commitment to a set of political convictions.

Compare his 2010 State of the Union to his first address to Congress a year earlier. The consistency is remarkable. In 2009, after passing a $787 billion (now $862 billion) stimulus package, the largest spending bill in galactic history, he unveiled a manifesto for fundamentally restructuring the commanding heights of American society — health care, education and energy.

This being a democracy, don’t the Democrats see that clinging to this agenda will march them over a cliff? Don’t they understand Massachusetts?

Well, they understand it through a prism of two cherished axioms: (1) The people are stupid and (2) Republicans are bad. Result? The dim, led by the malicious, vote incorrectly.

Liberal expressions of disdain for the intelligence and emotional maturity of the electorate have been, post-Massachusetts, remarkably unguarded. New York Times columnist Charles Blow chided Obama for not understanding the necessity of speaking “in the plain words of plain folks,” because the people are “suspicious of complexity.” Counseled Blow: “The next time he gives a speech, someone should tap him on the ankle and say, ‘Mr. President, we’re down here.’”

A Time magazine blogger was even more blunt about the ankle-dwelling mob, explaining that we are “a nation of dodos” that is “too dumb to thrive.”

Obama joined the parade in the State of the Union address when, with supercilious modesty, he chided himself “for not explaining it (health care) more clearly to the American people.” The subject, he noted, was “complex.” The subject, it might also be noted, was one to which the master of complexity had devoted 29 speeches. Perhaps he did not speak slowly enough.

Then there are the emotional deficiencies of the masses. Nearly every Democratic apologist lamented the people’s anger and anxiety, a free-floating agitation that prevented them from appreciating the beneficence of the social agenda the Democrats are so determined to foist upon them.

That brings us to Part 2 of the liberal conceit: Liberals act in the public interest, while conservatives think only of power, elections, self-aggrandizement and self-interest.

It is an old liberal theme that conservative ideas, being red in tooth and claw, cannot possibly emerge from any notion of the public good. A 2002 New York Times obituary for philosopher Robert Nozick explained that the strongly libertarian implications of Nozick’s masterwork, “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” “proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.” The right, you see, is grateful when a bright intellectual can graft some philosophical rationalization onto its thoroughly base and self-regarding politics.

This belief in the moral hollowness of conservatism animates the current liberal mantra that Republican opposition to Obama’s social democratic agenda — which couldn’t get through even a Democratic Congress and powered major Democratic losses in New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts — is nothing but blind and cynical obstructionism.

By contrast, Democratic opposition to George W. Bush — from Iraq to Social Security reform — constituted dissent. And dissent, we were told at the time, including by candidate Obama, is “one of the truest expressions of patriotism.”

No more. Today, dissent from the governing orthodoxy is nihilistic malice. “They made a decision,” explained David Axelrod, “they were going to sit it out and hope that we failed, that the country failed” — a perfect expression of liberals’ conviction that their aspirations are necessarily the country’s, that their idea of the public good is the public’s, that their failure is therefore the nation’s.

Then comes Massachusetts, an election Obama himself helped nationalize, to shatter this most self-congratulatory of illusions.

For liberals, the observation that “the peasants are revolting” is a pun. For conservatives, it is cause for uncharacteristic optimism. No matter how far the ideological pendulum swings in the short term, in the end the bedrock common sense of the American people will prevail.

The ankle-dwelling populace pushes back. It re-centers. It renormalizes. Even in Massachusetts.

IN THE aftermath of the Senate election in Massachusetts, the focus of attention is inevitably on what it means for Barack Obama. The impact on the Democratic president of the loss of the late Ted Kennedy’s seat to the Republicans will, no doubt, be significant (see article). Yet the result could be remembered as a message more profound than the disparate mutterings of a grumpy electorate that has lost faith in its leader—as a growl of hostility to the rising power of the state.  

America’s most vibrant political force at the moment is the anti-tax tea-party movement. Even in leftish Massachusetts people are worried that Mr Obama’s spending splurge, notably his still-unpassed health-care bill, will send the deficit soaring. In Britain, where elections are usually spending competitions, the contest this year will be fought about where to cut. Even in regions as historically statist as Scandinavia and southern Europe debates are beginning to emerge about the size and effectiveness of government.

There are good reasons, as well as bad ones, why the state is growing; but the trend must be reversed. Doing so will prove exceedingly hard—not least because the bigger and more powerful the state gets, the more it tends to grow. But electorates, as in Massachusetts, eventually revolt; and such expressions of voters’ fury are likely to shape politics in the years to come.

How it grew and grew

The immediate reason for the rise of the state is the financial crisis. Governments have spent trillions propping up banks and staving off depression. In some countries they now play a large role in the financial sector; and thanks to bail-outs, stimulus and recession, the proportion of GDP made up by state spending and public deficits has rocketed.

But the rise of Leviathan is a much longer and broader story (see article). Long before AIG and Northern Rock ended up in state custody, government had been growing rapidly. That was especially true in Britain and America, the two countries in which “the end of big government” had been declared in the 1990s. George Bush pushed up spending more than any president since Lyndon Johnson. Britain’s initially frugal Labour government went on a splurge: the state’s share of GDP has risen from 37% in 2000 to 48% in 2008 to 52% now. In swathes of northern Britain the state now accounts for a bigger share of the economy than it did in communist countries in the old eastern bloc. The change has been less dramatic in continental Europe, but in most of those countries the state already made up around half of the economy.

Demography is set to push state spending up further. Ageing populations will consume ever more public health care and ever bigger pensions. Unless somebody takes an axe to them, entitlements will consume a fifth of America’s GDP in 15 years, compared with 9% now.

Rising government spending is not the only manifestation of growing state power. The spread of regulation is another. Conservatives tend to blame the growing thicket of rules on unwanted supranational bodies, such as the European Union, and on the ever growing industry of public-sector busybodies who supervise matters like diversity and health and safety. They have a point. But voters, including right-wing ones, often demand more state intrusion: witness the “wars” on terror and drugs, or the spread of CCTV cameras. Mr Bush added an average of 1,000 pages of federal regulations each year he was in office. America now has a quarter of a million people devising and implementing federal rules.

Globalisation, far from whittling away the state, has often ended up boosting it. Greater job insecurity among the voting middle classes has increased demand for safety nets. Confronted by global market failures, such as climate change, voters have demanded a public response. And the emergence of new economic powers, especially China, has given fresh respectability to the old notion of state capitalism: more and more of the world’s biggest companies are state-owned, and more and more of its biggest investors are now sovereign-wealth funds.

What should be done?

Many difficulties present themselves to those who would reform the state. One is the danger posed by the fragility of the world economy. Government stimulus may still be needed to ward off a new slump. But even in the most vulnerable countries, governments need to be planning for withdrawal.

A further danger consists in equating “smaller” with “better”. As the horrors in Haiti demonstrate, countries need a state of a certain size to work at all; and more government can be good. The Economist, for instance, is relieved that politicians stepped in to bail out the banks, since the risks of tumbling into a depression were large. This newspaper also supported Mr Obama in 2008 in part because he wanted to extend health-care coverage.

How much a state spends often matters less than how it spends. Systems in which the state pays and the private sector provides often work well. Scandinavia’s schools are expensive, but they are by and large more efficient than their Anglo-Saxon peers. Much of France’s health care is paid for by the state but supplied by private hospitals.

Even where big change is clearly needed, the history of “reinventing government” shows it is not easy. The quick fixes, such as privatising national telecoms firms, have been done. Fortunes have been spent on management consultants in the public sector, without much to show for it (see article). In 1978 another American state shocked the world by rejecting big government: California’s tax-cutting Proposition 13 paved the way for Reaganism, but direct democracy has ended up making the Golden State’s government worse.

In these circumstances, hard rules make little sense. But prejudices are still useful—and this newspaper’s prejudice is to look for ways to make the state smaller. That is partly for philosophical reasons: we prefer to give power to individuals, rather than to governments. But pragmatism also comes into it: there is so much pressure on the state to grow (bureaucrats building empires, politicians buying votes, public-sector workers voting for governments that promise bigger budgets for the public sector) that merely limiting the state to its current size means finding cuts.

And cuts can be found. In the corporate world, slimming a workforce by a tenth is standard fare. There’s no reason why governments should not do that too, when it’s needed. Sweden and Canada managed it, and remained pleasant countries with effective public services. Public-sector pay can be cut, given how secure jobs are: in both America and Britain public-sector workers are on average now paid more than private-sector ones. Public-sector pensions are far too generous, in comparison with shrunken private-sector ones. Entitlements can be cut back, most obviously by raising pensionable ages. And the world might well be a greener, more prosperous place if the West’s various agricultural departments disappeared.

The Economist will return to these areas in coming months. All raise different issues; and different countries may need to deal with them in different ways. But one large general point links them: a great battle about the state is brewing. And, as in another influential revolution, the first shot may have been heard in Massachusetts.

David Brooks, The New York Times op-ed columnist, is a friend of mine. Flying always at 40,000 feet above ground, he strives to observe the political landscape with a dispassionate conservatism. His best columns are spare and thoughtful, and offer reliable contrast to the gaudiness of Maureen Dowd, the glibness of Tom Friedman, the mediocrity of Bob Herbert, and the mawkishness of Nicholas Kristof. Yet last Tuesday, in a column titled “The Tea Party Teens,” David made irrefutably clear that he, too—like so many others in the mainstream metropolitan media—is a cultural supremacist.

The column was about the Tea Party movement, which has, in the space of a year, come to inhabit—and inhabit raucously—the landscape that Brooks parses from his lofty perch. In the piece, he sets up a dialectic between “the educated class” on the one hand, and, on the other, a force that he identifies variously as “public opinion,” the “opposition,” and “the Tea Party movement.” The latter, a “fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against,” are, David writes, reflexively opposed to the beliefs of the educated class (to which he, naturally, belongs). They are, in effect, reactionaries.

The Tea Partiers, it is said, are crude, sloganeering, lemming-like, heartland Bible-Beltists who don’t understand policy or David Brooks’ subtleties.
Put to one side, for the moment, David’s exaggeratedly Hamiltonian belief in the natural leadership abilities of people like him, and ask this: What exactly is this “educated class,” and what leads him to think that those who oppose it are not, somehow, sophisticated? Forgive me, here, for bringing to the discussion a personal note. I have a cousin who is a Wellesley graduate, a widely traveled, thirty-something, multilingual daughter of Indian immigrants who lives in that most redneck of territories…Union Square, in Manhattan. She is a Tea Party supporter, and she wrote me these words in an email:

I laugh, but also feel indignant, when I read that the tea parties are filled with angry white men, because it’s obvious that reporters are not attending the same tea parties I attended. The events were a mix of young and old, VERY mixed ethnicities (but yes, a majority white). Everyone to a person was courteous and polite, and the best part was the signs, which were funny and clever. It did feel very grassroots and very much a movement fueled by the people rather than by shadowy party apparatchiks. It felt cool to think that we were not going to be taken in by government and be told what was good for us. (Does that sound really hokey?) It felt good to be a part of a group of people who were saying “enough!” I’m a huge supporter of the tea party movement because I think it exists outside of the traditional parties and is a true manifestation of the voice of the citizen.

Not everyone in the movement is a Wellesley graduate, and I bring my cousin into the story only as a forensic counterpoint to David’s fixation with the “educated class.” America doesn’t really have a class system, but that fact makes it tough for people like David, who sometimes seem to wish it did. The traditional solution has been to attend an Ivy League school if possible—or just cop an “intellectual” attitude if not—and then look down on the rest of America. When America was less of a meritocracy (and that was not so long ago), this solution was less damaging. Now that the country is run mostly by graduates of Ivy League schools, however, that they look down on the electorate is becoming not only vastly irritating to the electorate but also rather dangerous. Elitism, now, might have adverse political consequences—and a backlash.