Tea-bagger Blowback

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reviews the obviously orchestrated campaign by the radical right the shout down Democratic members of Congress in town-hall events around the country.

I wrote earlier this week that in the unfolding drama of the health care townhall teabaggery, conservatives have developed their series of shout-downs and freak-outs into something resembling a right-wing performance art. Still, though, with all the antics and ferocity, let's be honest, it's hard to deny there's a certain "Waiting for Guffman", "Best in Show" quality to the whole scene. As our team has reported on at some length already, there appears to be a reasonably well-orchestrated national effort to mobilize teabaggers to go and shutdown these townhall events with raucous demonstrations and generally making it impossible for the members of Congress to talk.

But that's not the most interesting part of watching this drama unfold. The truth is that there's actually quite a lot of authenticity packed into these events, often a bit more, sometimes quite a bit more than the partisans helping put this stuff together end up being comfortable with. Maybe the best example was back last year when the dying McCain-Palin campaign was toying with that proto-birther 'Obama's a scary Arab terrorist' craziness and then had those awkward moments like the time McCain had to snatch the mic away from that woman who started commiserating with him about how Obama was an Arab. That's the thing about where the GOP is right now. I don't question that they've gotten some traction on a range of issues over the last month or so. But they're still relying on some pretty far-out, alienated and often just generally whacked out folks to puts the gusts of wind into their sails.

Marshall hits a key point with that last sentence. The thing that prevented the original tea-bagging demonstrations from going anywhere was the incoherence of their message. These are little more than staged public temper tantrums that offer no credible alternatives in policy terms. David Frum nails this point on the conservative blog New Majority.

In this year 2009, it often seems that liberals offer policies and conservatives offer emotions...But emotional outbursts need to be the rarity, not the routine, in politics. This problem-solving country does not trust people who cannot master their feelings in the service of their goals. Ask yourself this: who was angrier in 2008? Obama or McCain? Who was angrier in 2004, Bush or Kerry? Bush or Gore? Dole or Clinton? It’s almost a rule of American politics: in any important race, the angrier candidate nearly always loses.

--Ballard Burgher