I came home Thursday night, just in time to catch Anne before she went out to canvass for Robin Carnahan, the Democratic candidate for Senator in Missouri. Carnahan’s opponent, Roy Blunt Jr., is the seven term congressman, former minority whip, former Tom Delay crony and consument insider. Of course this year, he is running as the anti-establishment political outsider and is still leading Caranhan in the polls. It is that sort of political year.
As a life long Democrat, I must confess that I was confused and somewhat surprised by this whole Tea Party thing. I feel like Alice must have felt after sitting down with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare. These people are crazy! I shouldn’t have been caught by surprise though, because as I have recounted before I got my first taste of the Tea Party movement, not more than one month after President Barack Obama was inaugurated. Check it out here. There was just one crazy old white guy then, now they are many.
A recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll equates the Tea Party with the Republican base. This quarter of the American electorate never liked Barack Obama, they never voted for him, they believe he is a Muslim, a Socialist and that he is a foreigner, etcetera, etcetera. Listen folks, Obama assumed his presidency at the cusp of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Who was the president for the previous eight years, that caused this crisis? Obama, the Democrats and even the Republicans enacted bailout and stimulus bills to stem the collapse of our economy and prevented this crisis from surpassing the deprivations of the Great Depression.
OK, we have these right-wing nuts that have overrun the Republican primaries and are now poised to win in November. Christine O’Donnell, the Tea Party candidate and now ‘by victory’ the Republican candidate for Vice President’s Joe Biden’s old seat is the poster child for this movement. I cast her as a Sara Palin wanna to be. She won’t fall into any of Palin’s Katie Couric bear traps, they have already been sprung, but she has plenty of problems of her own, like going on record against most of the American electorate having any form of sex. Yeah, that will work. Plus she took classes at the University of Phoenix and has construed that into going to school at Oxford.
Our next poster child is Carl Paladino the Tea Party/Republican candidate for governor in New York. He better represents the angry white guy aspect of this movement. Wednesday, he got into a shouting match with a NY Post reporter and repeatedly yelled, “I’ll take you out.”, as if he was Tony Soprano. Combined with his threat/promise to take a baseball bat to Albany, if he is elected. I think that he thinks that he is Tony Soprano. Maybe he should be running in New Jersey?
Finally, we have the case of Meg Whitman the Republican candidate for Governor in California. This former eBay executive has developed a nanny problem. Her housekeeper Santillan and the housekeeper’s lawyer Allred have accused Whitman of knowingly first hiring and then conveniently firing her un-documented employee. Whitman claims ignorance, but Allred has said, “I told the press that there was a 2003 letter that was sent by the Social Security Administration — what’s called a mismatch letter — indicating to the employer that there was a mismatch in the Social Security number that was provided by the employee.” Hmm, now on sale on eBay formerly for at a $100M asking price, the California Governorship; will now accept best offer.
Circling back home to Missouri, Anne with her patient, practiced and Mary Poppin’s practically perfect campaign canvassing techniques surely does more to advance Robin Carnahan’s campaign then my petty rants in this little blog does. Roy Blunt Jr. is the antitheses of what the Tea Party is supposed to be about. He is no wingnut, he is a political animal that is the product of the Republican political machine. The fact that he hales from southwest Missouri, also means that he has no love for Saint Louis. Anne has a lot more work to do.