By: MARK TAPSCOTT
Editorial Page Editor
The Washington Examiner
September 3, 2009
It’s not often that leaders of the moment’s most significant political movement miss the critically important public opinion shift of their time, but that is exactly what is happening right now with the Tea Party crusade.
Just when 57 percent of the American people – including most independents – are ready to throw all the bums out of Congress and start over, Tea Party leaders are wasting time, resources and their precious credibility fighting a comparatively minor skirmish with the unions…
…the crucial fact here is not the 57 percent of Rasmussen’s respondents who favor such action. Fully 59 percent said the same thing last October when Congress and the Bush administration were busily throwing $700 billion at Wall Street, allegedly to prevent an economic meltdown of unimagined severity.
The key here is that President Barack Obama and his Democratic congressional allies have moved so far to the left that they have forced a monumental shift among independents, and it was the Obamacare proposal to replace doctors with federal bureaucrats that made it happen…
…Opportunities like this come along once in a political lifetime. Instead of worrying about Whole Foods, the Tea Party leadership should be figuring out how to channel this tidal shift in American public opinion into concrete results in next year’s congressional elections.
Being nonpartisan, the Tea Party movement must identify and encourage like-minded candidates in both major parties. That means a Tea Party Movement Seal of Approval, or a Tea Party Pledge, to point voters of all stripes to the new blood needed to replace the current calcified cast of establishment insiders running Congress…
The complete article is here.
