What Does the Tea Party Want? Republicans Back in Charge

Next to my own in-depth and expert analytical coverage of the tea bagger movement, I think Jon Chait at The New Republic is doing a bang up job as well.

Chait sums up the movement in one sentence.  A sentence I wish was mine, and one I plan on stealing in the future to appear as mine.

"It's a revolt against the composition of government much more than the level."

What does this mean you ask.  It means Chait agrees with what I've been saying all along.  Tea baggers are no more against Big Government than they are against voting Republican.  Quite the opposite really.  They love government.  They love their highways, their power lines, their unemployment checks, their Medicare, their Social Security, and their tax payer funded employment.  They love it all.

What they don't like is someone else-- who doesn't vote Republican-- also getting services from the government.  And that my friends is the essence of the tea bagger movement.

As you'll recall, unless you're a Fox News fan, George Bush doubled the national debt and created a $1.4 trillion deficit.  He also grew the size of government more than any president since FDR.  And no where to be found during all this massive growth and deficit orgy were the tea baggers.  They claim, the tea baggers do I mean.  That they finally had enough after 8 years of Bush and complete fiscal irresponsibility and that the TARP vote finally sent them over the edge.

Well that may be true and I don't doubt it.  But TARP is actually making money for tax payers so for people who claim superiority with fiscal conservatives, they've really chosen the wrong rallying point.  I don't doubt TARP sent their blood a boiling because Fox News portrayed it as socialism and routinely pawns it off onto Obama. But what really formed the movement was when a Democratic black man named Barack Hussein Obama became their president.

Sure they hated TARP and President Obama's health care reform.  But both of those programs are paid for or deficit neutral (i.e., fiscally sane) and can't possibly be a rendezvous for people who claim to care about finances.  Even more than hating government services that are actually paid for which is just insane when you think about it, they hate Democrats.