Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [119]
As the protests unfolded, Fox News provided nonstop fair and balanced promotion of the events. Glenn Beck held a Tea Party fundraiser and reported live from a protest at the Alamo, where he gushed about the enthusiasm of the participants.65 Sarah Palin keynoted the National Tea Party Convention, telling participants, “America is ready for another revolution.”66 The religious right also joined the fray, represented by Tony Perkins, the president of James Dobson’s Family Research Council, and Dr. Rick Scarborough, a well-known Baptist preacher (“I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I’m a Christocrat.”67) Richard Viguerie even reemerged, calling the Tea Party movement “an unfettered new force of the middle class” and offering training courses for organizers.68 Former representative Tom Tancredo represented the xenophobic wing. At one Tea Party convention, he blamed Obama’s election on an alliance between elitist liberals and illegal immigrants, telling participants:
The revolution has come. It was led by the cult of multiculturalism, aided by leftist liberals all over, who don’t have the same ideas about America as we do . . . People who could not spell the word ‘vote,’ or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.69
Without a single organization or leader running the show, and with every conservative ideologue in the country seeking to cash in on Tea Party fervor, the movement became a grab bag of right-wing doctrines and conspiracy theories. If there is a single unifying sentiment shared by all who claim allegiance to the Tea Parties, it is a profound hatred of government. And not just any government. The Tea Party supporters’ unbridled hostility toward President Obama suggests that maybe, just maybe, their chief concern is not the power of government per se but the power of those who are currently running the government.
After all, most of today’s right-wing heroes had defended President George W. Bush’s defiant expansions of executive power. America’s founding fathers, so revered by today’s Tea Parties, assigned specific powers to three separate branches of government with checks and balances to keep any one branch from gaining too much authority. But President Bush used executive signing statements and recess appointments to bypass the constitutional authority of Congress; and he used warrantless wiretaps, indefinite detentions, and secret military tribunals to bypass the constitutional authority of the Supreme Court. Nonetheless, in Bush’s eight years in office, there were no Tea Parties, and the only people to express any fear of tyranny were liberals. But when President Obama suggested expanding the AmeriCorps volunteer program during his campaign—look out, America, here comes Hitler!
To be clear, there are legitimate political concerns mixed in with vitriol. Reasonable opposition to the health care bill, government spending, and other Democratic policies is good for the country. The problem lies in the way the right wing has been articulating its objections and motivating supporters. For the most part, Tea Party leaders have not been attacking the administration’s policies on their merits; they have been demonizing Obama, the Democratic leadership, and liberal supporters with scare tactics modeled on the persecution formula. These tactics have reached a level of intensity and maliciousness that the country has not seen since the Red Scare.
Why does Obama inspire such fear? His race is certainly a factor, but the answer is more complex than simple racism. Today’s Tea Parties are a far cry from George Wallace’s race-driven campaigns. Indeed, one Tea Party-supported congressional