A Brief History…

By Bradley J. Fikes

Where have we seen this before?

Tired of ‘tea party’ sniping, moderates organize
In Washington, a new advocacy group decries ‘the tyranny of hyperpartisanship.’ And powerful New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg throws his support behind candidates willing to reach across the aisle.

Galvanized by the lightning-in-a-bottle success of conservative “tea party” candidates, moderate Republicans and others in the political center are looking for ways to push back against what they see as an advancing tide of ideological extremism.

The efforts are loosely organized and embryonic, but politicians, advocacy groups and others are piecing together a framework to promote moderate candidates and advance positions they say have been eclipsed by partisan sniping on the right and left.

“Middle America is being ignored by Washington and the media. Centrists are desperate for a voice today; they feel entirely unrepresented,” said Mark McKinnon, a political strategist and former advisor to President George W. Bush . . .

Underscoring those efforts is a newfound drive by advocacy groups to give moderate voters a louder voice. In Washington, a nonprofit group called No Labels is forming with the goal of bringing Republicans and Democrats together; echoing tea party rhetoric, it terms itself a “citizens movement” and decries “the tyranny of hyperpartisanship.” . . .

You can click on the link to read all of Oliphant’s ponderous puff piece for yet another attempt to match the Tea Party.

Remember the Coffee Party? Remember One Nation, an avowedly liberal group. They both flopped.

The Coffee Party had the same theme as the new group of reducing partisanship and giving a voice to “moderates.” That sounds attractive. But it flopped for two big reasons: One,  it is a top-down movement by Democratic political operatives with no grassroots support. The Coffee Party was created by Democratic operative Annabel Park to take the pressure of Obama and the congressional Democrats.

The same appears to be the case with this new movement, fixated on stopping Tea Party “sniping” as the LA Times puts it. We get the message: The lefty LA Times doesn’t like the Tea Party, so it’s promoting an opposing movement.

The Washington Post did the same thing with its puff piece on the Coffee Party, using this lede:

Furious at the tempest over the Tea Party — the scattershot citizen uprising against big government and wild spending — Annabel Park did what any American does when she feels her voice has been drowned out: She squeezed her anger into a Facebook status update.

Of course, Park isn’t just “any American.” She’s campaigned for Virginia senator Jim Webb and for Obama, her Democratic record airbrushed out of the WaPo story. The other alternative is that the WaPo reporter was just lazy and naive, and took Park’s claim of non-partisanship at face value.

Coffee Party activists go through preposterous contortions to avoid being known as left-leaning Democrats. Alan Alborn, mentioned in the WaPo Coffee Party article, said this in February on his blog (emphasis mine):

Let me add a new dimension to the health care discussion. I consider our nations health a National Security Problem. We maintain a standing Army to defend our citizens from foreign invasion; however, we let them succumb to disease because they can’t afford health insurance. We spend billions for a world class defense establishment; however, our health system is 37th (according to the WHO ) right below Costa Rica and trailing all of the industrialized countries. I am a small Government Libertarian; however, as I age I find it more difficult to rationalize why the richest Country in the world fails to provide a the best health care in the world to its citizens… and trails the Industrial world (including Countries with Socialized medicine). What greater responsibility may a Government have than ensuring the health of its citizens?

A “small Government Libertarian” who approves of socialized health care! That’s an Oxymoron with a capital O. And Alborn uses the “richest country in the world” argument, a common socialist trope. As a real capital-L Libertarian, I smell something very fishy about this claim. I’d say it’s more likely that Alborn has dressed up a socialist idea in flimsy Libertarian drag in the hopes of fooling critics. A more generous interpretation is that Alborn doesn’t understand enough about Libertarianism to know why his muddled support of “Socialized medicine” is incompatible with Libertarian beliefs.

Alborn even trots out the argument that the “general welfare” part of the preamble justifies national health care. So much for his knowledge of the Constitution and its enumerated powers. The preamble is a list of reasons why the Constitution was established, not an enumeration of the government’s powers. Not surprisingly, that distortion was used by congressional Democrats to justify ObamaCare.

Astroturf and a phony message turned the Coffee Party into rancid grounds. The newest faux-grassroots attempt to match the Tea Party is headed for the same dismal fate, because they still don’t get it.

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As with all published here, this article represents my opinion, and not necessarily that of my employer, the North County Times.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 26th, 2010 at 10:58 am and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.