The Empire 680

Tea & Crackers
How corporate interests and Republican insiders built the Tea Party monster
By  Matt Taibbi  Sep 28, 2010 7:01 AM EDT
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904
This is an article from the October 15, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.

It's taken three trips to Kentucky, but I'm finally getting my Tea Party
epiphany exactly where you'd expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot
mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called
the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a
giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners.
Palin — who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand
Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate — is railing
against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched
Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it
seems, is nigh.

"We're shaking up the good ol' boys," Palin chortles, to the best applause
her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her
speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped
on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who
underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. "Buck up," she says,
"or stay in the truck."

Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?

Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately
struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person here.
The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly
every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping
their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin
launches into her Ronald Reagan impression — "Government's not the
solution! Government's the problem!" — the person sitting next to me
leans over and explains.

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"The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They have
these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your scooter!
Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."

A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing
against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as
they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP
establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea
Party represents, I can't imagine it.

After Palin wraps up, I race to the parking lot in search of departing
Medicare-motor-scooter conservatives. I come upon an elderly couple, Janice
and David Wheelock, who are fairly itching to share their views.

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"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound
Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."

"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"

"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole
life."

I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"

Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her
hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!

"Let me get this straight," I say to David. "You've been picking up a check
from the government for decades, as a tax assessor, and your wife is on
Medicare. How can you complain about the welfare state?"

"Well," he says, "there's a lot of people on welfare who don't deserve it.
Too many people are living off the government."

"But," I protest, "you live off the government. And have been your whole
life!"

"Yeah," he says, "but I don't make very much." Vast forests have already
been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what
it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've
concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact:
They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a
movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the
reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters
who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two
electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals
and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is
sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money
spent on them. In fact, their lack of embarrassment when it comes to
collecting government largesse is key to understanding what this movement
is all about — and nowhere do we see that dynamic as clearly as here in
Kentucky, where Rand Paul is barreling toward the Senate with the aid of
conservative icons like Palin.

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Early in his campaign, Dr. Paul, the son of the uncompromising libertarian
hero Ron Paul, denounced Medicare as "socialized medicine." But this
spring, when confronted with the idea of reducing Medicare payments to
doctors like himself — half of his patients are on Medicare — he
balked. This candidate, a man ostensibly so against government power in all
its forms that he wants to gut the Americans With Disabilities Act and
abolish the departments of Education and Energy, was unwilling to reduce
his own government compensation, for a very logical reason. "Physicians,"
he said, "should be allowed to make a comfortable living."

Those of us who might have expected Paul's purist followers to abandon him
in droves have been disappointed; Paul is now the clear favorite to win in
November. Ha, ha, you thought we actually gave a shit about spending,
joke's on you. That's because the Tea Party doesn't really care about
issues — it's about something deep down and psychological, something that
can't be answered by political compromise or fundamental changes in policy.
At root, the Tea Party is nothing more than a them-versus-us thing. They
know who they are, and they know who we are ("radical leftists" is the term
they prefer), and they're coming for us on Election Day, no matter what we
do — and, it would seem, no matter what their own leaders like Rand Paul
do.

In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American
revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they
disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is
America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that
insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today
is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality,
the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet
under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few
genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time
before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots
movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked
into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down
until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors
want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation.

The rest of it — the sweeping cuts to federal spending, the clampdown on
bailouts, the rollback of Roe v. Wade — will die on the vine as one Tea
Party leader after another gets seduced by the Republican Party and
retrained for the revolutionary cause of voting down taxes for Goldman
Sachs executives. It's all on display here in Kentucky, the unofficial
capital of the Tea Party movement, where, ha, ha, the joke turns out to be
on them: Rand Paul, their hero, is a fake.


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