“The Democrats are now the party of the state,” Daniel Henninger writes, noting that “If you produce a bill that Olympia Snowe of Maine cannot vote for, you have not produced legislation ‘for the generations.’ You have not even produced legislation that is liberal:”
Spring renewal and baseball’s new season are upon us, so let’s quote the optimism of Yogi: It isn’t over until it’s over. I thought 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. Sunday night in Washington was the Republican Party’s finest hour in a long time. When the voting stopped, the screen said the number of Republicans voting for Mr. Obama’s bill was zero. Not one. Nobody.
Pristine opposition is being spun as a Republican liability. It looks to me like a Republican resurrection. The party hasn’t yet discovered what it should be, but this clearly was a party discovering what it cannot be.
Put it this way: If you produce a bill that Olympia Snowe of Maine cannot vote for, you have not produced legislation “for the generations.” You have not even produced legislation that is liberal. You have produced legislation from the left. You have produced once-in-a-lifetime legislation that no Republican from any constituency across America could vote for.
Finally, we are achieving real political definition.
The Democrats are now the party of the state. The 20th century hybrid version of the Democratic Party, which included private-sector industrial unions and Wall Street liberals, is being abandoned by its leadership as unwanted and increasingly unnecessary.
Meanwhile, at The Hill, “Congressional disapproval ratings hit 72 percent,” now at October of 1994 levels.
Related: As James Taranto writes, in the immediate aftermath of ObamaCare’s partisan — and quite possibly pyrrhic — victory, the state-run media are “sore winners:”
The liberal media, it seems, are sore winners. Charles Blow says he perceives “an increasing sense of desperation” on the part of “far-right extremists.” He then adopts the amusing conceit of addressing them in the second person on the pages of the New York Times:
The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.
You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.
If Blow and his like-minded colleagues really believed this, you’d expect them to show some degree of magnanimity. If they were really worried about political violence and incendiary rhetoric, they’d modulate their own tone rather than ramping it up as they have.
Frank Rich, echoing John Avlon, likens a handful of incidents of vandalism against Democratic congressmen’s offices to Kristallnacht, the 1938 German pogrom. Avlon and Rich, that is, are suggesting that politicians from the party in power are in a position analogous to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. This does not bespeak real confidence in “the relentless, irrepressible march of change.”
If you ignore Bloomberg’s narrative and its noxious headline, and just focus on the data in the poll, you can see why the tea-party-haters might not be as confident as they claim to be. For the survey actually suggests that tea-party sympathizers are quite mainstream.
Bloomberg’s poll results are available here. The survey included 1,002 adults, of whom 26% described themselves as “a supporter of the tea-party movement.” (The full breakdown: 8% “strong supporter,” 18% “just a supporter,” 53% no, 21% not sure.) The report does not break down the results by those who are supporters, so we have to rely on Przybyla’s piece for those data. The size of this subsample is also rather small (around 281 people), so that the findings are tentative at best.
Nonetheless, the results reported by Przybyla run counter to the media stereotype of tea-party activists as far-right extremists.
First, consider the finding that 90% of them “say the U.S. is verging more toward socialism than capitalism.”
Where on earth would they get such a fringe idea?
Related: “CNN’s Room 101 Math.” The forced viewing of CNN at every airport certainly feels like Orwell’s two-way telescreens come to life. And CNN has never met a Big Brother-type figure it didn’t love.
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