Ron Klain provides a needed reminder of the forgotten origins of the Tea Party movement, here:
Although we now associate the Tea Party with a general opposition to government spending, it was mortgage-relief policies that were the target of the seminal rant by the CNBC commentator Rick Santelli in February 2009 that is credited with getting that movement off the ground: “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”
A striking aspect of the conservative backlash against the administration’s mainstream economic policies -- from using federal money to keep teachers on the job, to saving the domestic auto industry, to investing in job-creating public works projects -- is how much the opposition’s arguments have been based on morality and values, not economic considerations. Sure, critics offer facts and figures to challenge these policies, but the most potent weapons have been values-laden attacks about borrowing from the future, being irresponsible about spending, and failing to hold the profligate responsible for the consequences of their ways. Even direct beneficiaries of the president’s policies have pressed these moral critiques.
Klain fancies, however, that there was an equivalent moral reaction on the left to Obama's failure to prosecute wrongdoers. As genuine as it may have been, and still is, it did not translate itself into political action on a scale which did anything. It was the Tea Party which gave the Republicans a stunning and sweeping national victory in November 2010 screaming No! to Obama's policies. It entirely co-opted the left's moral pretensions.
And I rather doubt there are many leftists who would concede the right's claim to such moral equivalence with them. They still think of themselves as far superior, both intellectually and morally, to everyone else in America.
Nevertheless, while malefactors continue to go unpunished, the bailouts are a fact and have not been reversed. To that extent, the Tea Party has not been victorious at all.
It may just be my imagination, but in a better time in America left and right could have come together at a time like this to reverse these injustices. Until they do, we will live uncomfortably in a house divided.
