Beginning Of The End: Sarah Palin Hijacks The Tea Party Movement
By Kleinheider
Posted on February 7, 2010 at 7:33 am
The tea party movement is dead. The one I was familiar with anyway. Judson Phillips held it down and Sarah Palin drove a stake right through its heart live last night on C-Span in front of an unsuspecting audience.
Sarah Palin didn’t give a tea party speech last night. She gave a partisan Republican address. It was a purely political speech designed to position her for a presidential run in 2012 or 2016. Period. She wasn’t there to celebrate the organic nature of a movement she had nothing to do with creating. She was there to co-opt the name and claim the brand as hers. And she did.
The movement, that came to be officially recognized almost a year ago but whose roots go back further than that, has been snuffed out and replaced in the public mind. The movement that began as a people’s movement of angry independent, libertarians and conservatives will now be thought as the movement of people like Palin, Dick Armey, Judson Phillips, Mark Skoda, etc. Essentially, a wholly owned subsidiary of the “Official Conservative Movement” and the Republican Party.
This new tea party bears no resemblance to the one that began a year ago as a reaction to the collapse of our financial system and the subsequent bailout. That movement of ragtag and unorganized libertarians, independents and conservatives was something new and unique. An authentic protest movement angered not just by the new President, Barack Obama, who had presided over the bailouts but the president who started the ball rolling and whose incompetence had led to the crisis in the first place, George W. Bush.
The people we saw on the steps of Legislative Plaza and county courthouses across the state last year weren’t “movement conservatives.” Certainly the movement conservatives were there at those protests but the tea parties were much bigger in size, scope and concept than just traditional modern conservatism reheated. Last night, the professional conservatives fixed that for good.
For over a year the media has struggled to try and define just what exactly the movement was. Now they have a definition.
Sarah Palin.
Palin, while explicitly saying the movement had no leader, implicitly offered herself up as one. After this speech, which was widely covered on the internet and carried on television, the tea party movement and Sarah Palin will be inextricably intertwined.
So with the spotlight on her and the attention of the curious media surrounding her what did she present as a tea party agenda? What did she discuss?
Ronald Reagan, national defense and superficial deficiencies of the current democratic occupant of the White House. Wow. In all honesty, the speech could have just as easily been given in 1994 as in 2010 which, of course, was the last time Republican operatives and professional conservatives sought to exploit an authentic populist movement of the center-right.
Ronald Reagan? Are you serious? Three times the name was invoked during the speech. Sure, it was his birthday but it serves to remind us what kind of crowd this was in front of those C-Span cameras.
These weren’t the people who were out protesting. This weren’t regular folks. This was the same old network of conservative hacks, flacks, publicists and hangers-on. This was Conservative Inc.
Ronald Reagan has nothing to do with the tea party movement. Nothing. Ronald Reagan is the past. The GOP’s past, no less. The tea party movement was supposed to be the future.
The fact that Palin even has the temerity to position herself as a leader in the movement (and despite her protests that’s exactly what she was doing) is offensive to any student of very, very recent political history. Palin, as mavericky and rogue as she likes to paint herself, was the Vice-Presidential nominee of the Republican Party in 2008. She ran with John McCain and defended the Bush legacy. A project she continued last night in front of a faux-tea party audience.
In her remarks, Palin praised the Senator from Arizona and chastised the current President for blaming the past one for his problems. Now, I don’t know every tea partier out there but I do know a few and I don’t remember any of them having a whole lot of good to say about President Bush or John McCain. While they don’t have much positive to say about Barack Obama there no love for George Bush either.
And when did the tea party movement get a foreign policy? I didn’t put a clock on it but the first portion of Palin’s speech seemed very heavy on the neoconservatism.
Palin expressed dismay about the fact that President Obama spent only “9 percent” of the State of the Union on foreign policy and stated that Americans “deserve to know the truth about the threats we face and what the administration is or isn’t doing about them.”
She talked about “homicide” Bombers and the slammed the administration of its handling of the man who plotted to take down a Detroit airliner on Christmas Day.
“Treating this like a mere law enforcement matter places our country at grave risk because that’s not how radical Islamic extremists are looking at this,” she told the assembled at Opryland. “They know we’re at war. And to win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law standing at the lectern.”
Judson Phillips and Sarah Palin
Palin talked about standing up to Iran, defending Israel and making the world safe for Democracy. All noble goals, I suppose, but what was she doing justifying and perpetuating the foreign policy of George Bush at a tea party convention?
The tea party I’m familiar with was concerned more about the collusion of big business and big government than the War in Iraq. The tea party I’m familiar with was more concerned about rejecting the bailout of Wall Street while looking for ways reinvigorate the economy of Main Street than looking for Al-Qaeda. The tea party I’m familiar with seemed more concerned about restoring the Republic at home than Democracy abroad.
Almost from start finish, Sarah Palin outlined an agenda that either ignored or de-emphasized the issues and the spirit that the tea parties were founded on.
Sure, there was some of the old school tea party rhetoric in there for flavor but, for a keynote address to a movement that at its inception was very radical, there was nothing radical about Sarah Palin’s speech. It was derivative circa 2004 neoconservatism as far as I could tell.
But the media now have their definition of what it means to be Tea Party. This convention gave them simplistic nativism, birtherism, media bashing, homophobia, and a heavy does of neoconservative foreign policy.
That is the image of tea partydom that Judson Phillips poured out to the eager media this weekend and is now percolating through the many channels of mass and new media.
By Monday afternoon, it will begin to harden and the tea party movement will be Sarah Palin’s movement.
And that is no tea party at all.
