Thoughts on the Tea Party Victories

Let's face it. For most people living in America right now, the status quo stinks.

Whenever you have a lot of people as dissatisfied with the status quo as the average American is today, that's usually not good news for the party in power.

We can go on and on about class privilege and white entitlement and so forth but the fact still remains is that a lot of people are hurting right now and when you're hurting, you're tempted to vote for whoever seems to have the most promising remedy for your hurt. Hell, you'd vote for a blind, lame idiot if you thought there was even the slightest chance he or she would change the status quo in your favor.

I don't particularly care for the Tea Party and I especially don't like the way the Lauren Valle incident has been dismissed by the majority of American voters as a minor issue. But I don't see the Tea Party going away unless both main political parties get their act together and start addressing their constituents' very real concerns.

I don't say this because I honestly believe the Tea Party is going to solve anything. Indeed, I would be very surprised if their actions didn't make things worse. But I also realize that you don't have to be a snobbish homophobic racist to be dissatisfied with the government right now and it's that dissatisfaction which was fueling the recent victories more than anything else.

Of course, the more attention the party gets, the more I'm reminded of that old Beverly Hillbillies episode in which a rival banker continually tries to woo the Clampett family away from Milburn Drysdale's bank by making them think that he would take care of their money much better than Milburn Drysdale. In order to prove this, he asks that the Clampetts attempt to withdraw their money in cash from Drysdale's bank, and of course when they attempt to do just that, Drysdale is forced to admit that he couldn't possibly convert all their funds to cash in just one day. Granny Clampett promptly accuses him of spending all their money and promptly persuades Jed to deposit all the family money with the rival banker. However, once they accomplish this, the first thing Granny wishes to do is to once again withdraw all the Clampett millions in cash, this time from the rival's bank. Of course, the poor man is forced to admit that such a withdrawal would be impossible, which drives Granny to the conclusion that the Clampetts might as well keep their money with Mr. Drysdale because the rival banker spent their money even faster than he did.

If you think the relevance of that episode to current events is unclear now, just wait a year or two. After all, the Tea Party candidates would not be the first politicians to gain office by promising miserly spending habits, only to turn into drunken sailors when confronted with the opportunity to control actual government funds.