Tea Party movement: Focus on defeating pols, not electing them

I accept that it's hard for Americans who are conditioned to view one party or candidate as the antidote to the other to break that habit of thought and grab hold of a different concept. We deeply feel that if can just send enough "Mr. Smiths" to Washington all will be well.

But that no longer works in the era of a massive welfare state, where the political system is dominated by public employee unions and other concentrated interests who benefit from big government, all rippling with political muscles. They have created a system that quickly co-opts 95 percent of successful candidates, regardless of what promises they made on the campaign trail.

Further, the bipartisan political class has perfected the tools of political manipulation, and none of them hesitate one nanosecond to use the instruments of that welfare state to retain their hold on power. The romantic "Mr. Smith goes to Washington" model just can't make a dent in that system.

Have you watched that video of Gresham Barrett being relentlessly booed? In that instant, all the tools of political manipulation that he and fellow members of his class have perfected over their lifetimes could not help him. Imagine that scene being replicated hundreds and thousands of times around the country and you'll start to get a glimmer of how the world might really be changed. It's a very different model than Mr. Smith goes to Washington, but it's one that genuinely has the potential to bring about real change.

"Career politicians are afraid of offending party leaders and lobbyists."

Indeed, and this also makes me realize that there's a conflict between the interests of grass-roots Tea Party protestors whose sincere desire is real change, and those of GOP candidates plus the people who personally benefit from the election of those candidates.

It's in the interest of the former to declare a pogrom against all members of the political class in and out of office. That's highly threatening to those who have made a career of politics and gaining non-civil service goverment employment (that is, the jobs that one acquires from working for or being a winning candidate).

This is interesting. The booing of Congressman Gresham Barrett reveals even more than I imagined.

"Lets get some infomercials going staring We The People expressing the importance of registering and voting."

Not so sure about that one. First, who's going to pay for them? More fundamentally, we don't need to mobilize a bunch of people who haven't voted before. Rather, those who always vote need to change their behavior, no longer allowing themselves to be manipulated by the political class.

Over his career Congressman Gresham Barrett has received hundreds of thousands of votes from people who probably believed that he was "conservative," or at least that he was better in ways that matter from his Dem opponent. Those voters and millions like them have been successfully manipulated by the political class.

I've been thinking more about this, applying the model to specific races, and seeing some challenges. It works best in a primary between a no-name newcomer with few ties to the establisment and an incumbent member-in-good-standing of the political class, but not every election presents such a stark choice. For example, in Michigan there's going to be a GOP primary for Governor, and there's not a dime's worth of difference between the candidates in this dimension - not a Palin, Jindal or Sanford in the bunch.

Here's another: One of those gov candidates will be Pete Hoekstra. That leaves an open seat in a GOP Congressional district. It's a four way primary now - two political class members-in-good-standing, and two ambitious newcomers with few or no ties to the political class. How does this "Send Them Home!" movement identify and coalesce around just one of the latter?

David Farrar -

All true, very cool, somewhat heartening!

JM