Word: movement
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...deserve re-election, up 10 points from 2006. Public skepticism about the Federal Government and its ability to solve problems is nothing new, but the discontent is greater today than it has been in at least a decade and a half. Witness the growth of the Tea Party movement, a diffuse conglomeration of forces that have coalesced around nothing so much as a shared hostility toward Washington. Or the Feb. 15 announcement by Indiana Senator Evan Bayh - a man who almost made it onto three presidential tickets - that he would not stand for re-election because "Congress is not operating...
...foreclosure crisis. Multibillion-dollar proposals were flying like snowflakes in Washington, and Santelli's rant struck a chord with people who wondered where all the money would come from. "We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party," Santelli declared, evoking the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor. A movement was born. Egged on by conservative interest groups and leveraging Barack Obama's digital-networking strategies, grass-roots opponents of the President's agenda have made themselves a major factor in U.S. politics...
Naming the Tea Party movement, however, is easier than defining it. Tea Partyism covers a lot of ground and a world of contradictions. It contains Nashville lawyer Judson Phillips, who recently organized the first Tea Party convention at the posh Gaylord Opryland Hotel, charging $549 per ticket and pocketing an undisclosed profit. But the movement also embraces the volunteers who denounced Phillips and his convention as a money-grubbing mistake. The crowd in Nashville cheered as speaker Joseph Farah demanded proof that Obama is a U.S. citizen. "Show us the birth certificate!" Farah cried. But other Tea Partyers were equally...
Whether bitter or sweetened, the tea is winning admirers. According to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, roughly 1 in 5 adult Americans identifies with the Tea Party movement, which scored its first major victory last month when Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by the late Democrat Ted Kennedy. Brown's promises to bolster U.S. defenses against terrorists and block Obama's health care reforms gave him a blinding Tea Party aura, the glow of which sent fear through the Administration and fried the circuits of Congress. But you can no more trace that...
Perhaps this isn't surprising. With the economy shaken and unemployment sky-high, with the federal debt mounting by the trillion as Washington politicians pay lip service to fiscal responsibility (picture a sermon on humility delivered by Shaquille O'Neal), an outbreak of outrage was inevitable. The Tea Party movement is just one expression of a vast discontent unsettling the country. Recent polls have found that two-thirds of Americans describe themselves as dissatisfied or angry with their government - a huge, not-so-silent majority that ranges from conservatives convinced that Obama is a Maoist to liberals convinced that...