And Bogie, I’d have to disagree somewhat. I think they underestimate us but understand what they’re dealing with quite well. The attempt to paint the progenitors of the Tea Partiers as a vast right wing conspiracy worked extremely well for Clinton, once he got his McVeigh. If this crew doesn’t get something like that handed to them, they’ll have to manufacture it. And that just might work again.
Clinton is not exactly the same as Obama IMO. Right hand, left hand, same statist monster, you could argue … but I would say, “right hand, left hand” means they are indeed not the *same* hand. IE they operate differently, and one hand is almost always more dextrous than the other. Clinton, I think, is the more dextrous hand. To the extent that he grew up around any normal people in Arkansas, which he likely did, he knows Jacksonian America exists and is real, i.e. not a GOP construct. I don’t believe Obama ever had any comparable experience. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Jacksonians are completely and utterly alien to him. That he is having great difficulty grasping the existence of Jacksonians, period, means he doesn’t understand what we want and is therefore self-limited (less dextrous than Clinton) in his ability to respond to us. Hence the repeated doubling-down, instead of triangulating. In Obamaworld, *everyone* wants Mo Gubmint. That is all he has ever known. If anybody says they don’t want more government, they can’t possibly be sincere. They are either (1) astroturf mouthpieces for the GOP out to sabotage the DNC agenda, or (2) bitter clingers, and therefore deranged.
The possibility that the administration (either Obama or the Clintons, or some combination thereof) will actively try to McVeigh the Tea Party movement — i.e. go beyond verbal denunciations to action — is real IMO and therefore enormously troubling. The difference is that it is not 1995. Islamic terrorism and economic collapse are wolves howling on the other side of the door, this time around. McVeigh appeared at a time when there was a lot more stability, domestically and internationally. The extremity of his reaction was wildly disproportionate to his grievance, and thus the evil was self-evident to everyone. Even if you hated what happened at Waco, OKC was still disgusting, abhorrent and evil. “What the hell is government doing that warrants THAT?” was the reaction of the broad swath of of Americans.
This time around, the federal government is visibly out of control and is recognized as being such by the majority of Americans. Government is the great destabilizer today … not the Tea Partiers. And I think most non-Tea Partiers (those who aren’t among the 20% rabid lefists, at any rate) recognize this. What is crucial is for the Tea Party movement to continue to refuse being provoked into extremism, but to keep up the pressure nonetheless. Eventually, the tyrants will be the ones who lash out. Because that’s who they are.
