Circling the Wagons: The Tea Party Has Liberals on the Run, or Does It?

A flock of Tea Partiers are descending on Washington this week like so many songbirds of spring.

No one knows how many will travel to the capital, but organizers with the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition and Tea Party Nation expect busloads from around the country for a weeklong frenzy they are calling "Take the Town Halls to Washington."

They will scatter across Capitol Hill, pecking at 50 or so congressmen who are wavering on health care reform. The high note will come with a rally at the Capitol on Tuesday, March 16, just two days before the scheduled make-or-break vote on the bill, surely one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in decades.

Still, something is brewing here. Lately, a panic seems to have set in among the liberal-progressive media and political classes most often entrenched in the New York-Washington corridor. Picking up on recent opinion columns, political analyses and cable news chatter, you can see the making of a bunker mentality among the best and the brightest.

It's been a time coming. In August the media ignored or dismissed the Tea Partiers as gnats of negativism and ultra redneck right-wing nuts. By November, the media were ridiculing and caricaturing the growing movement. In January, after Scott Brown's shock-and-awe victory in Massachusetts, the media turned on the floodlights, footlights, and spotlights on the Tea Partiers, capped by an exhaustive New York Times excavation of the movement's origins, ethics and ethnics, demographics and direction.

In the article, we learned that the long moribund John Birch Society was alive and kicking, that Patriot whackos, Friends of Liberty, Oath Keepers and buzz-cut, goose-stepping militia groups of the private Idaho sort – in short, the honor guard of the right-wing lunatic fringe – were all threading into the Tea Party movement, along with upright middle class mom-and-pop families and idealistic collegians, Reaganites, and old-time conservatives and independents.

Alarms went off all over the place. Then the Tea Party's idol, Sarah Palin, early this month helped uber-conservative Gov. Rick Perry of Texas win a three-way primary (against a far-right unknown and a highly respected moderate/conservative U.S. senator). And now, a Tea Party darling, the young Marco Rubio, is leading Gov. Charlie Crist of Florida in the race for a GOP Senate nomination, 60 percent to 28 percent. Rubio's climb from obscurity parallels the Tea Party's ascent in national politics. These days, with Tea Party branches, stems, and offshoots posing electoral threats north and south, east and west, the chattering (shattering?) liberal-progressive elites are on alert mode, darting here and there trying to figure out if democracy can survive.

Nowhere was this scene more hysterically staged than on "Hardball," the Chris Matthews platform on MSNBC. Here are excerpts from a printed transcript of the show on March 1.

Matthews, asking the panel about the Texas primary: "How big of a player will the Tea Party movement be in tomorrow's election?"

Chris Cillizza, Washington Post.com, minutes later: "Rick Perry was very, very smart. He saw the energy in the Tea Party movement and he was among the first elected officials anywhere in the country to put his name to it, appearing at rallies and that sort of thing. In doing it, he co-opted a lot of the anger on the far right."

Matthews, later in the show: "Let's look at the map of the country right now. Look at some of these states coming up, where the Tea Partiers are challenging what we used to consider unbeatable types. . . . Out in Arizona, who would have thought John McCain would have trouble getting re-nominated? He's going to have a real battle on his hands beating J.D. Hayworth. And down in Florida, Marco Rubio. . . . He's already moving ahead of Charlie Crist down there. It ain't just local in Texas."

Wayne Slater, Dallas Morning News, responding: "No, it's not. You see this everywhere, all over the country."

Gloom-and-doom predictions hover over the Democrats in the run-up to the mid-term elections. The president is faulted for pushing health care reform, for the economic malaise, and for an inability to connect with and persuade ordinary Americans (that's a nod to Tea Partiers). Charlie Cook, a respected independent political analyst, has been appearing on cable talk shows and in print, forecasting a bloodbath for the party in November. "When a party's snakebit, it's really snakebit," he told The New York Times.

And so it's time to circle the wagons.

Oddly, liberals who helped carry Barack Obama to the presidency, the same columnists and talking heads who idolized him in 2008, who projected grand visions on the flat surface of Obama's persona, those very same voices are trying to save him by tearing him down.

At the head of the "tough love" parade is Frank Rich, the renowned liberal columnist, who proffers advice to President Obama almost every Sunday in the op-ed pages of The New York Times. Echoing several other eminences of the polite left, Rich concluded in his Sunday column that "there's one note that runs through many of the theories as to why Obama has disappointed in Year One, it cuts to the heart of what had been his major strength: his ability to communicate a compelling narrative. . . . The problem is not necessarily that Obama is trying to do too much, but that there is no consistent, clear message to unite all that he is trying to do."

From his high perch, Rich then gives the president a deadline: "Obama doesn't have a year to arrive at his finest hour. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the clock runs out on Nov. 2."

Howard Fineman of MSNBC offered the president a 10-step plan, starting with, "Don't let your fellow Democrats panic." Fineman said the "health care crusade put the worst traits of a (Democratic) Congress on display; made the Obama administration look elitist, out of touch and too liberal for independent voters; and allowed the White House to be perceived as imperious and incompetent -- a toxic combination.''

The high-tone New Yorker weighed in with a dense piece called "Obama's Lost Year." In the thicket, you find golden nuggets, including the kicker quote, from Tom Perriello, a Democratic congressman from Virginia: "The thing that gives me hope right now is that the President has got the message that this is a 'Let Obama be Obama' moment, that he should rise or fall on who he really is. The downside is, I don't think we know yet who he really is."

With supporters like those, Obama might be tempted to toss his liberal rascals out of the tent. But he's too smart for that. He's not taking comfort in those who give him a pass, saying that campaigning and governing are distinctly different pursuits. Instead he is listening to liberals' criticism and today, this week, he's out there in the real America, like the campaigner of 2008, selling and hawking and peddling, playing to the hilt his best role, salesman of dreams.

And for that, we must thank the Tea Party movement -- for shaking up Washington.