Finally ... the Tea Party that I know, the coalition that counts adherents among my neighbors and the people of this rural Texas region...
To put it politely, it's the ambivalent Tea Party. It's the party that has joined with and is manipulated by some old pros like Dick Armey and his Freedom Works. Tea Party? It's less the party of Tea than it is the party of Cake And Eat It Too.
When Tom Grimes lost his job as a financial consultant 15 months ago, he called his congressman, a Democrat, for help getting government health care.
Then he found a new full-time occupation: Tea Party activist.
In the last year, he has organized a local group and a statewide coalition, and even started a “bus czar” Web site to marshal protesters to Washington on short notice. This month, he mobilized 200 other Tea Party activists to go to the local office of the same congressman to protest what he sees as the government’s takeover of health care.
These folks aren't entirely shameless. Many, perhaps most, are Boomers -- a generation of Americans who grew up in prosperity and with great expectations and now find many jobless among its numbers. For some of us in other generations, the Boomers come off as smug and spoiled. Perhaps those tags apply just as well to many Tea Party members, only now -- jobless and looking for someone to blame -- they've become angry and mean.
In its report today, the New York Times takes a close look at some Tea Party and Freedom Works activists. For example, Tom Grimes:
The Tea Party vehemently wants less — though a number of its members acknowledge that they are relying on government programs for help.Mr. Grimes, who receives Social Security, has filled the back seat of his Mercury Grand Marquis with the literature of the movement, including Glenn Beck’s “Arguing With Idiots” and Frederic Bastiat’s “The Law,” which denounces public benefits as “false philanthropy.”
"Help for me, but not for thee" is their anti-government cry, bearing out what many of us have believed for years: the Boomer generation includes some of the most naive and selfish people of our era. Whether they like to admit it or not, many are still mired in racism. It's not really government they're against, they're against the Obama administration. Take 67-year-old Diane Reimer, a well-known Freedom Works activist.
She has no patience for the Obama administration’s bailouts and its actions on health care. “I just don’t trust this government,” Ms. Reimer said.
Tom Grimes (50) is another Tea Partier who suffers from considerable confusion and disingenuousness.
He blames the government for his unemployment. “Government is absolutely responsible, not because of what they did recently with the car companies, but what they’ve done since the 1980s,” he said. “The government has allowed free trade and never set up any rules.”
He and others do not see any contradictions in their arguments for smaller government even as they argue that it should do more to prevent job loss or cuts to Medicare. After a year of angry debate, emotion outweighs fact.“If you don’t trust the mindset or the value system of the people running the system, you can’t even look at the facts anymore,” Mr. Grimes said.
Nobody is accusing the Tea Party of looking at the facts. Certainly they seem unaware that they're being manipulated by parasites.
Tea Party groups like Freedom Works recognize that they are benefiting from the labor of many people who have been hit hard economically. But its chairman, the former House majority leader Dick Armey, argued that their ranks will remain strong — and connected — even as members find work.
Maybe. Maybe not. It gets harder to avoid reality as you get older.
