Michael Rentiers

How many trees must die before the MSM gets it right?

It seems that every day barrels of ink are wasted by journalists in an attempt to fit the TEA Party movement into the quintessential article.  One that encapsulates and codifies exactly who those people are and what their existence means to American politics.  In doing so, the completely and continually miss the mark.

Now, I am not referring to the stark-raving mad lunatics at MSNBC, who routinely rail against the TEA Party groups as racists and Nazis. They don’t want to get it, they want it to go away.  I am referring to the constant attempts by regular journalists to predict what candidates this group will support, what it means if that candidate loses, and what it means if those groups don’t actually all support the same candidate. Despite the pushing and pulling, they just won’t get that square peg into a round hole.  And in doing so they only serve to misstate reality, demonstrate their inability to think outside conventional political theory and ultimately they elevate those groups that we all know they really don’t like anyway.

Take for instance the recent primaries in Texas, where current Governor Rick Perry overwhelmingly won a three-way contest. Granted, Perry utilized a TEA Party narrative (anti-Washington) to great effect against Senator Hutchinson, but he too was an incumbent. There was also a “true” outsider candidate in Debra Medina that the MSM had convinced themselves was THE nominee of TEA Partiers in the Lone Star State. In an article from Politico about the support given to Perry by the TEA Party, a sub headlined stood out in bold:

“Is the Tea Party movement a paper tiger?”

The answer is no.  It is also not a collective group-think and, to the chagrin of MSNBC, they are not all from the furthest reaches of the right-wing tin foil hat crowd.  You see, Medina turned out to be a nut job “truther” and TEA Party voters recognized that. They by-and-large decided to back a winning horse despite his long tenure.  Additionally, they voted for their incumbent Congressional delegation even though many had outsiders running against them.

What the The TEA Party is (and what journalists can seem to come to grips with), is a real  but nebulous grassroots movement based around a loose set of constitutional principles.  The influence “leaders” have only extend to the limits of individual chapters-if that. They are not fringe voters (although, as in any political group, they exist). Their ranks are filled with former and current Republican activists and they seem to be smart enough to balance their ideology with pragmatism enough to win elections.  The MSM will not be able to stuff it into a neat little box of predictability and it seems to be causing them fits.

I hope the movement continues to remain a coalition of individuals and like-minded groups that work together for a common purpose but otherwise have little formal structure. I fear that attempts to label, create one platform, nationalize or provide the media with one cookie-cutter narrative for the  movement will only serve to hasten the end to the uniqueness of what American conservative politics is experiencing.