The Left Still Doesn't Get the Tea Parties

Where will it end? At some point liberal pundits will have to stop blaming the Tea Party movement for everything.

In a fit of “through the looking glass” reasoning, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank says we should blame the Tea Partiers if government does NOT get smaller. “If Tea Party adherents were serious about shrinking the federal government,” he opined, “they would have put down their picket signs, abandoned their defense of Christine O’Donnell’s phony résumé and crowded into Room 608 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building last week.”

Milbank was lamenting all the empty seats at a briefing by the President’s Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. Why that’s the Tea Party’s fault is far from clear. If the White House wanted to fill the 11 empty chairs, they could’ve called on MoveOn.org, the DNC, or the bevy of White House interns to serve as seat-warmers.

If Milbank knew anything about the Tea Party movement, he would understand why they have little interest in the commission’s work. At least two of the three general thrusts of the commission’s proposals make little sense to conservatives.

The commission’s primary thrust is to raise taxes in the name of fiscal responsibility. But Tea Party adherents don’t regard higher taxes as a civic, economic or moral virtue. They view it as a green light for more federal spending–and that’s not what they want. They want smaller government and reduced spending.

Nor do they regard another commission thrust–cutting defense spending–as an act of fiscal prudence. They view it as an imprudent exercise in compromising security.

Baseline defense spending, measured as a percentage of GDP, is already a near post World War II low. Forty years ago, Pentagon spending represented half the federal budget. Today, it’s less than a fifth. That figure illuminates Washington’s real spending problem: It’s not spending too much on national security; it’s spending too much on everything else.

The third part of commission’s advice is about rolling back profligate federal spending. Had they focused just on that, Tea Partiers might have packed the room to cheer the commission on. But who has time to sit through the same-old, same-old about raising taxes and cutting defense to get to the good stuff?

The day after Milbanks’ off-target screed, another stray round from la-la land ricocheted through the press, this one fired by The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder. Writing about a (then) unpublished column opposing defense cuts, Ambinder asserted: “Although the op-ed, written by FPI’s Bill Kristol, AEI’s Arthur C. Brooks and Heritage’s Edward [sic] Fuelner [sic], sets up the Obama administration as its foil, the real purpose [is] to nudge Tea Party conservatives back into line on defense spending, according to a Republican strategist who is working on the program.” His thesis, too, reflects ignorance of Tea Partiers.

First, nobody tells the Tea Parties what to do. Quite the opposite. They are disparate groups composed of disparate individuals–amateur activists, soccer moms, small-business owners, you name it–who are fed up with being told what to think. What unites them is the desire for limited government, responsible spending and the preservation of individual freedoms.

Second, it is a huge mistake to conflate how the Tea Parties think about national security with how libertarians (fine fellows though they are) view the issue. Many Tea Party activists would lustily cheer Reagan’s motto of “peace through strength.” Some of their most treasured pin-ups–Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman and Jim DeMint, to name just three–are as hawkish as they come.

Recently, I spoke at a First Coast Tea Party event in Jacksonville, FL. A couple of hundred folks showed up. None seemed pleased with the news President Obama is cutting corners on defense.

Note to Washington: Maybe, just maybe, the grassroots Tea Party movement and established conservative leaders like Kristol, Brooks, and Feulner are worked up about all the talk of gutting defense because they think it’s a colossally bad idea. Sometimes, you know, the simple, obvious and common-sense answer really is the correct one.