Every time someone like Sarah Palin or Newt Gingrich starts railing on ”the mainstream, liberal media,” I cringe just a little bit. But today I am here to say – and it pains me greatly – that I am starting to see their point.
While I think Arlen Specter should have been tossed out on his shifty ass after his misogynistic performance during the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas fiasco, which happened in the early 1990s I believe, the voters of Pennsylvania took their time and waited until this week to do it. Good for them. And in Kentucky, one of the tea party guys beat the favored horse in a race more hyped than their drunken derby. And in Arkansas, Blanche Lincoln, who switches positions more quickly than I do, has to do a runoff.
And on the national news – radio and television – the commentators, the analyzers, the experts, the pundits, they are shocked. Parsing is apparently the word of the week in the studios, and they are parsing the living hell out of everything and doing so, in my opinion, in a way that’s completely off the mark.
They keep mentioning the tea party movement, and whenever possible, when someone from the tea party is included in these pieces, it’s someone as inarticulate and drawly as you can imagine. They keep mentioning that this week’s elections are a referendum on President Obama. They keep saying that what the American people really want is for the parties to work together on their behalf.
I think what the American people want is some money. Not that long ago $700 billion was handed out to save the country, if not the world. We were at death’s door, after all. Many of the liberal people I know tell me that this was absolutely necessary, that without it we’d be in seriously sorry shape. I do not speak or think in numbers, so I take it on faith that they’re right. While there’s a lot I don’t know, there are some things I do know, and here are a few of them. Unemployment in this country is still at 10 percent, more or less. Even though we’ve lost millions of gallons of oil, gas prices don’t seem to be going up. My health insurance premium, which I pay myself, is going to go up 13 percent under healthcare reform; it went up 22 percent at the beginning of this year. I know a lot of people who lost their jobs, and most of those people who have managed to find new ones took a hefty pay cut in the process. Plenty of people are still losing their homes. Plenty of people are still burning through their life savings to care for loved ones with dire health issues. Plenty of people in the financial industry enjoyed record profits last year, and along with record profits, record bonuses. As it turns out, the people responsible for seeing that business was conducted properly in the offshore drilling biz were also being paid by the companies they were supposed to be regulating. Are there any major stories that don’t include, sooner or later, some greedy thief dressed up as an elected official busted with his or her hand in the till?
And why exactly is it that the television people continue to dismiss these very basic observations as uniformed, overly emotional, part of the tea party fever? I think it’s because it shatters their narrative, undermines the authority of people like Amy Walter, the editor of the Hotline, who sits in Washington and calls the shots on races – past, present and future – in cities and towns she’s probably never been to. Last night they propped her up on the Newshour, along with some guy from the Washington Post. Amy Walter, through lips stuck somewhere between a grin and a smirk, dismissed the tea party because, according to her, it doesn’t have a clear message articulating what it stands for, and it has no leader.
As much as she bugs me, I have to hand it to Amy Walter for describing perfectly my problem with the Democrats. They had no shortage of messages in 2008. End the war, reform healthcare, empower all of us. Those are great messages, and I do not regret voting for them. And thus far, they have indeed reformed healthcare for the stockholders and executives at health insurance companies (the single payer option was never seriously considered). They’re ending the war by sending 30,000 more people into battle. And they’re making it clear that even people from humble origins can serve on the supreme court as long as they have a degree from an Ivy League school. As for the party’s presumed leader – which is important to people like Amy Walter – well, he and his wise advisors have wised up and are no longer sending him out to stump for candidates who adhere to the same messages. That’s because he has an almost perfect track record on that one: when he shows up in campaign mode, the candidate he’s supporting usually loses.
