Thanks for the kind comments on my thoughts on Delaware. But I wanted to add a brief note about the views of Karl Rove, who blasted away at Christine O’Donnell before the votes were even all counted. It’s an instructive moment about how the old guard is failing to adapt to this new environment. It’s been a rough cycle for Rove. He’s provided behind-the-scenes consulting, and in some cases public backing, for a number of losing candidates — Tiarht in Kansas, Castle in Delaware, Kay Bailey Hutchison in Texas — and he’s seemed out of his depth on radio and television appearances. Rove’s disappointingly bland memoir , released earlier this year, depicts a builder who was successful more because of his ability to identify the priority of grassroots targeting than any grand political strategy. Perhaps Rove was always better at understanding how to target and motivate people from the top down, rather than understanding why they would choose to motivate themselves from the ground up. In any case, Rove is still a voracious reader and a self-taught master of political history — so it’s puzzling why he’s having such difficulty identifying the trends of the moment. The similarly history-obsessed Newt Gingrich can still claim credit for the most prescient statement about the Tea Party movement when he spoke at CPAC in February, comparing the new wave to Poland’s solidarity movement. “We stood in the streets, and looked around, and realized — there are more of us than there are of them .” It’s just that instead of Gingrich’s “media elites” being the target, the group on the other side is the right’s own establishment. As Jonah Goldberg says this morning: “The message coming out of Delaware to everyone in the tea parties’ way, Republican and Democrat alike, is: Watch out.” Follow Ben Domenech on Twitter.
Originally posted here:
Karl Rove and the Tea Parties
Filed under: Barack Obama , Humor , Race Issues , Chaos Theory , Tea Party Give me liberty or give me a marker!
I told you a while back about a small group of Republican Senators sitting down for drinks at the Capitol Hill Club. They’d been to a tea party rally that day and were openly mocking the tea partiers. One of them, a guy tea partiers adore, seemed to hold them in open contempt at this table. Well, between the tea partiers and Jim DeMint, these Republican Senators are getting a lot of heartburn and are starting to speak out. One of the good old boys of the club who can speak freely because he’s on the outside lobbying in now is the former leader of the Senate Republicans, Trent Lott. Former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), now a D.C. lobbyist, warned that a robust bloc of rabble-rousers spells further Senate dysfunction. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” Lott said in an interview. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.” But Lott said he’s not expecting a tea-party sweep. “I still have faith in the visceral judgment of the American people,” he said. Oh, so Lott is rooting against us. So is Bob Bennett. Bennett says the GOP is going to lose Kentucky, Nevada, and Colorado because of the gosh-darn tea party activists. But don’t worry. After flying back from Colorado where he was out with Orrin Hatch helping Jane Norton raise money, John Cornyn said this: “The candidates are not ours to choose. . . . They’re the choice of the primary voters in the states, and I think we should respect their choices.”
See the article here:
Senate Republicans to Tea Party Activists: Go To H – E – Double Hockeysticks
From Politico.com in April of this year:
At his 100th-day town hall meeting in St. Louis Wednesday, President Barack Obama took direct aim at the anti-tax “tea party” demonstrations that have cropped up over the last month and took a veiled shot at the Fox News Channel, the cable news network closely associated with the protests.
Asked about fiscal discipline and entitlements reform, Obama seemed to be repressing a smile as he jabbed critics of his spending plans.
“Those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I’m not very popular, and you see folks waving tea bags around, Obama said, “let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we are going to stabilize Social Security.”
“But,” Obama continued, “let’s not play games and pretend that the reason [for the deficit] is because of the Recovery Act.”
From Businessandmedia.org:
“The White House says the president is unaware of the tea parties and will hold his own event today,” ABC’s Dan Harris said on “Good Morning America” on April 15.
Way to tell the truth, Obama.
