Blowing Smoke - Michael Wolraich [120]
But there’s also a reason that only 1 percent of Tea Party supporters are black and only 41 percent believe that Obama was born in the United States.70 For over three decades, the right wing has been developing a powerful narrative according to which an alliance of liberal elites, racial minorities, and other marginal groups seek to persecute white, Christian conservatives. In the age of Fox News, talk radio, and conservative political dominance, that narrative is more popular than ever before. And at the very moment that this persecution mythology flooded into the mainstream, the government was taken over by Democrats and led by a man who by his skin color, his ancestry, his church, and his politics perfectly symbolizes the fearsome adversary that right-wing leaders have been warning their constituents against. Just as Sarah Palin personifies the righteous conservative victim, Barack Obama personifies the dangerous alliance between elites and minorities. That Obama’s policies are no more liberal than Bill Clinton’s and a good deal less liberal than Jimmy Carter’s or even, in some ways, Richard Nixon’s is irrelevant. The myth of Obama’s secret revolutionary intentions is so entrenched that the right wing’s view of the man has become completely detached from reality. No matter what he says or does, the Tea Party conservatives know him only as “the socialist ideologue in the White House.”
Getting Rid of RINOs
As the Tea Parties mobilized against the enemy, the Republican Party once again sought to harness right-wing paranoia for political gain. A number of ultraconservative Republicans, like Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and Representative Michelle Bachmann, have been outspoken proponents of the Tea Parties from the beginning, but the Republican leadership has also gotten involved. Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele met with fifty Tea Party leaders in February 2010 after telling a radio host, “I’m a tea partier, I’m a town haller, I’m a grass-roots-er.”71 House minority leader John Boehner likewise insisted, “There really is no difference between what Republicans believe in and what the tea party activists believe in.”72 And in a speech to thousands of Tea Party protesters in Washington, he played the part to the hilt, declaring, “This [health care] bill is the greatest threat to freedom I have seen in the 19 years I have been here in Washington.” In the crowd, someone carried a poster that read OBAMA TAKES HIS ORDERS FROM THE ROTHCHILDS [sic]. Others held up signs that portrayed Obama as Hitler, Mao Tse-Tung, and Little Black Sambo.73
In many ways, the GOP is indeed benefiting from paranoia about Obama. The Tea Parties have already helped the Republicans capture the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in Massachusetts, and they will aggressively mobilize their constituents to vote Republican in the November 2010 midterms. But they have exacted a price. In AD 376, the Roman emperor Flavius Julius Valens permitted the Visigoths to settle in Roman territory, seeing in them “a splendid recruiting ground for his army.”74 Two years later, the Visigoths decimated the Roman army and killed the emperor, eventually sacking Rome itself. Similarly, the Tea Partiers at the gates have launched yet another purge of insufficiently doctrinaire Republicans.
The first victim was Dede Scozzafava. The state Republican Party nominated her for a special election to fill a vacant congressional seat in upstate New York. But Scozzafava was a moderate who supported abortion rights and same-sex marriage. Even worse, conservative blogger Erick Erickson of RedState.com reported that she had been backed by (gasp!) ACORN. He wrote, “We need to make sure Scozzafava is destroyed at the polls. It would be bad news to have an ACORN backed candidate infiltrating the GOP in Congress.”75 Rush Limbaugh accused Scozzafava of “widespread bestiality . . . She has screwed every RINO in the country.