The tea party movement and its passion arose in response to trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see and out of a sense that Washington is in need of dire fiscal reform.
I think the Tea Party movement is great. I think anybody who has been frustrated over the last few years with the Republicans and Democrats, when they were trying to grow government and have spending and we weren't focusing on creating jobs and get our private sector growing again, I think that's when people started to wake up.
President Obama has only had two major policy victories during his tenure: the stimulus package and Obamacare. Both are massively unpopular. The stimulus package launched the Tea Party movement. Obamacare led to the Republican wipeout of 2010.
The beauty of the tea party movement is that it is independent and thus a true check and balance of the Republican and Democrat parties. It's not a pawn of the GOP, thus untouchable in criticism of the Democrats - I view it as an unattached conscience of the Republican party.
The tea party movement sprung from plain old disenchantment, disappointment, and outright anger at being fleeced by a government who mistook their primary job as being 'spend cash mon-nay' rather than execute the Constitution.
The tea party movement has challenged the GOP to get back on track or risk losing its grip on the right wing. It's reminded Democrats that a slick marketing campaign coupled with paid activism isn't the same as a groundswell of real change, and the reason that Democrats are so hostile towards it is because they've never before encountered it.
We can't disrespect, by way discounting or misunderstanding our different sticking points, the beliefs of the various groups comprising the tea party movement, but we all have more in common with each other than we do with factions on the Left: the communists, the socialists, the say-they're-anarchists-but-are-actually-socialists.
The Tea Party movement and the Occupy movement were both, in a sense, complaining about the same thing, namely the use of public money to rescue failed banks.
It is not an overstatement to say that Obamacare was the single most important catalyst leading to the tea party movement.
The political Right is particularly vehement when it comes to compromise. Conservatives are now strongly swayed by the Tea Party movement, whose clarion call is a refusal to compromise regardless of the practical consequences.
