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The Tea Party movement, spurred by increases in federal government spending, has been a contentious element in American politics for more than a year now.
One of the last major bills signed by George W. Bush, the controversial Troubled Asset Relief Program that bailed out banking giant AIG, was estimated in April 2009 to have a final cost of $356 million, according to a Reuters report.
This act started the movement’s snowball. When President Obama took office and signed an expensive stimulus bill, the group was incensed. Potentially costly health care legislation will not help ease the tension between Democrats and the Tea Party.
But this tension doesn’t just stem from leaders in the White House and is neither Democratic nor Republican.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is fighting for his political career in the 2010 Senate race. A poll showed McCain has 47 percent of support to challenger J.D. Hayworth’s 42 percent, according to an April 16 article by Rasmussen Reports.
In 2004, McCain got 100 percent of his primary. The times have changed since then — back when Bush was almost popular.
That change is the Tea Party. Their motivation was a massive increase in government spending.
Although America always has and forever will run a debt, the precedent the Bush and Obama years have set has led to alarm from the Tea Party crowd. Both Republicans and Democrats, they say, have failed to find efficiencies of late.
The reaction of the two established parties has been to marginalize the movement, which started on the fringe but has now moved into newspaper headlines and nightly broadcasts — grassroots and unorganized, but as close to a strong third party as we have today.
Former Massachusetts governor and potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney urged tea partiers to get on board with the GOP in a March interview with Newsmax. He forgets the movement started because of disagreement with the Republican message.
Democrats have been trying even harder to take down the movement. A 2009 press release from the Utah Democratic Party calls it “corporately funded, Fox News and right-wing radio orchestrated.”
MSNBC pundits Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow, among many other commentators, have even started to call protesters “teabaggers,” normally used as a slang reference to a sexual act.
These are desperate grasps to radicalize the movement. The tea partiers should be encouraged by this. It proves they have enough of a voice to be attacked by party leaders.
Leaders shouldn’t be looking to incorporate the movement into their parties or isolate them from discussion, because the Tea Party transcends party lines. It has an excessively libertarian bend — many in the movement hail Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, as a hero.
Paul ran for president as a Libertarian in 1988 and as a Republican in 2008. In the House, he continually clashes with leaders in both parties.
An April 24 letter to the editor in the Cape Cod Times said, “You have to hand it to the Republicans: The tea party movement is nothing more than a brilliant rebranding of the Republican Party, only this time without Bush-Cheney.”
Many in America believe Republicans control the movement. They are mistaken. Talk to McCain. Talk to Rep. Gresham Barrett, R-S.C., who was booed by nearly 3,000 tea partiers at a 2009 speech.
Why was he booed? He supported Bush’s TARP.
Although I don’t fully agree with the movement, its significance should not be dismissed. Any belief on fiscal policy with the support of that many Americans has enough merit to be examined.
The Tea Party movement may not succeed in winning over the country, but they have triumphed by holding some leaders accountable for voting records — a feedback mechanism the country is inarguably founded upon.
Michael Shepherd is managing editor for The Maine Campus.
