Quote Of The Day
This is usually Bruce’s department, but I thought this was too good to pass up. Here’s Jazz Shaw relating what’s he’s discovered about the Tea Party movement by actually meeting Tea Partiers:
The point is, meeting with tea party supporters has been a surprising experience. It’s not politics as usual and the old rules about Red vs. Blue and D vs. R don’t apply. Like any large gathering, you’ll find a couple of people with some more fringe outlooks, and that seems to be who the television cameras focus on. (We had one couple at a recent meeting who were obviously birthers and wanted to ask about Obama’s birth certificate, but they were quickly shushed by the rest of the crowd.) But for the most part, each group seems to carry its own distinct flavor and topics of interest. The one thing they seem to have in common is that they are unhappy with the current leadership in D.C. and they have come to play a serious game. If you think you already know the tea party movement, there’s a good chance you don’t. It’s kind of like trying to say you know the ocean. It’s big, it’s powerful, it’s rarely the same twice, and you never know exactly what it’s going to do next.
I bolded that one sentence just because it really stood out for me as crystallizing the movement as a whole. The Tea Party is all about constituents finally paying very close attention to what their representatives in Washington are doing. I’ve said before that when Americans really start to pay attention to someplace (e.g. the Middle East) or something (Federal Government), they tend to radically change it forever. That’s the “serious game” I see being played all across the country. And I think that is an unalloyed good.
BTW, read the whole thing.