Word: teas
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...more about the Tea Party...
...many Democrats now embrace the label in place of the term liberal. It's an apt adoption. Like many Democrats today, the progressives of a century ago believed in the ability of social-science-minded intellectuals to analyze civic problems and engineer a way for government to tackle them. Tea Partyers say that belief, an integral part of the Obama team's mind-set, is crazy, even dangerous. They believe problems are better solved by individual efforts than through government programs. And they are suspicious that the real point of progressivism is not to solve problems but to concentrate power...
...second recurring note is darker. Like many other populist movements in American history, Tea Parties have become magnets for conspiracy mongers and nativists. Nashville conventioneers roared their approval when former Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo blamed Obama's election on voters who can't speak English. Because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country," Tancredo declared, Americans "put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House ... Barack Hussein Obama" - with an ominous emphasis on the President's middle name. Perhaps the most talked-about book of the convention was The 5,000 Year...
...election campaign. Then, as now, the culprit was a sour economy, but the voice of indignation came not from TV ranters but from a Dallas billionaire. H. Ross Perot catalyzed an anti-incumbent, back-to-basics, pox-on-Washington movement that is the spiritual ancestor of today's Tea Parties - right down to the hand-painted placards and the occasional powdered wig. Suzanne Curran, a Tea Partyer from Virginia, sounded as if she had stepped out of a time machine straight from a Perot rally when she said recently, "It's time that we speak up - we the people...
...striking that the Reform Party, founded by Perot to keep his crusade alive, has virtually no appeal to the Tea Party crowd. There is a lesson in that. Grass-roots uprisings come and go, and protest candidates rise and fall. In the flush of righteous battle, people focus on the beliefs they share and tolerate points of difference. Eventually, though, the battle ends, the smoke clears, and even when the movement has some success, its troops tend to go their separate ways. After Perot retired from politics, his movement fell to pieces; Patrick Buchanan carried the Reform Party's banner...