Recent Currents: From the Tea Party to the 2012 Election (Part One)

(Note: This is the first segment in a three part series.)

With a de-regulated, sinking economy, hemorrhaging debt and spiraling downward toward depression, the ordinary citizen turned away from the Neocon movement in the election of 2008. In a cartoon analogy, it was as if the voters swooped in just in time to snatch the Neocons from a train racing toward the cliff’s edge. In its place President Barack Obama’s message of hope, a relief train, was embraced. Perhaps a bridge to the future did appear to look like a more promising alternative than the status quo...

Following its defeat in the election of 2008, the Republican Party has been engaged in the healthy process of re-examining and re-organizing its political priorities. Rescued from destruction and once safely upon the relief train, the Republican Party has had the opportunity --- the luxury in fact --- to sit down, relax and catch its breath. What it had just been through, and put the nation through, was indeed traumatic. Once the picture stopped spinning, there would be time for a shave, a shower, a hot meal and a beverage. It could re-group. It would thereafter claim a re-doubled effort on the elusive goal of smaller government. After all, this had been the stated goal at the inception of the Bush/“43” administration. In the meanwhile, previous efforts to ban abortion in the US would be abandoned.

Consequently, entering the 2010 Congressional midterm elections, the Republican Party was re-energized through its conservative base. The phenomenon of the Tea Party had been born. Beginning as a “headless” movement, not attached to either party, it quickly began to flex its new vocal cords, finding a home among conservative Republicans on the political stage. Its main platform seemed a familiar one in Republican Party circles going back at least several decades: to reduce the size of the federal government --- and curtail its involvement in the daily lives of ordinary citizens --- by shrinking its budget. The Tea Party cited effective examples of a federal government continuing to grow unchecked and out of control, among them the financial bail out of Wall Street and the newly enacted national health care law. And a stalled economy with a stubborn jobless rate persisted.

The message resonated. The 2010 midterm elections would serve as a backlash to President Obama, as they had similarly set back then-Presidents Reagan in 1982 and Clinton in 1994 before. Some say that this time it was as a direct result of the Tea Party. In one evening the Republican Party would re-capture the US House of Representatives in an election that just about put Republicans on equal footing with the president's party. The Republican Party would also re-claim a significant number of state governorships, important in positioning for the presidential election of 2012. Through its new ally, the Tea Party, the Republican Party had claimed another “mandate” to reduce the size of government.

In the summer of 2011 the Tea Party utilized its influence to effective end in the political imbroglio surrounding the raising of the nation’s federal debt ceiling. The timing, however, was interesting. History had reflected that Congress had previously raised the federal debt ceiling some 17 times during the Reagan presidency, 6 times during the Bush/“41” presidency, 4 times during the Clinton presidency, 7 times during the Bush/“43” presidency and 3 times during the Obama presidency. That’s a total of 37 times since 1980.

It was a high stakes game of political brinkmanship, the Tea Party using the threat of US government default as a political weapon. Treasury officials warned that the failure to act to raise the national debt ceiling, which the then-Reagan administration had claimed was a matter of “routine housekeeping,” would have calamitous consequences. Democrats even quoted Mr. Reagan’s words that the failure to act would result in consequences which were “impossible to predict and awesome to contemplate.”  Others, however, contradicted the conservative icon, expressing “no doubt that we will not lose the full faith and credit of the United States,” that the failure to act would presumably be of little consequence.

Tea Party advocates utilized what was described as a harsh, “cuts only” approach to negotiation, a necessary condition precedent before they would agree to raise the debt ceiling. In the process, and as President Obama pointed out, the Tea Party had flatly rejected a “balanced approach” which had been utilized previously by former Presidents Reagan, Bush/“41” and Clinton. This balanced approach featured a combination of spending cuts and tax increases, requiring the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations to pay their fair share by giving up tax breaks and special deductions.  In fact, many of the leading Congressional Republicans who voted in favor of the Tea Party’s “cuts only” approach had also voted in favor of the previous spending binges of Mr. Obama’s Republican predecessors.

When a budget deal was finally hammered out, it was not without consequences. The nation’s credit rating had been downgraded by one of the major national credit rating agencies for the first time in US History.  As a result, financial markets both in the US and around the world continued to wobble.

In the aftermath of the Congressional battle, both sides were left bruised and exhausted. But President Obama was conciliatory and inclusive. “The reason I am so hopeful about our future --- the reason I have faith in these United States of America --- is because of the American people,” the president said. And although individual opinions can and do differ, the president identified what has always made America great, and distinguishes us from the others: “It’s because of their perseverance, and their courage, and their willingness to shoulder the burdens we face --- together, as one nation.”

(Next week's second segment tackles the provocative question: What does the Tea Party really want?)

-Michael D'Angelo