The silenced majority vs Versailles Tea-bagger obsession

by: Paul Rosenberg

Mon Oct 11, 2010 at 16:30

"Can you hear me?" That's the recurring refrain in a radio promo for this weekend's "Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention," which-with an estimated crowd of 3,000-purports to be one of the largest rallies yet of so-called "Tea Party" sympathizers. The 60-second radio spot by keynote speaker Lou Dobbs features allegedly outraged Americans repeating that line, interspersed with un-attributed stats about how Americans supposedly oppose stimulus spending, health care, and other government spending policies "Maybe Washington can't hear us," Dobbs intones dramatically, "because they're just not listening."
Not listening to whom? For two years media obsession with the Tea Party has drowned out nearly every other voice in the public debate, a self-perpetuating feeding frenzy that has raised the volume on this population's views to a disproportionately deafening roar. Yet, as is shown all too clearly in Project Vote's recent poll report What Happened to Hope and Change? A Poll of 2008 Voters, these shouts for attention are coming from a segment of the population that is overwhelmingly white, wealthy, and older-and one that is out of touch with the needs and views of most Americans.

I just wanted to pull some of the more telling charts from Project Vote's report on their poll, starting with this one showing the actual composition of the American electorate:

At 32%, Obama's base of black, youth and low-income voters is 10% larger than the 29% of Tea Party supporters.  Yet the amount of attention they get is far, far less.  And they're never treated with a presumption of being "real Americans" who need to be listened to.

More on what folks have to say via a series of snapshot tables and snappy comments on the flip.

The fact that--contrary to all macro-economic understanding--further stimulus spending is marginally less popular than reducing the debt is clearly due to the intensely anti-stimulus sentiment of the atypical Tea Bag contingent:

It's striking that Tea Baggers are dramatically more pessimistic about the economy--less than 10% consider it getting better, while over 50% consider it getting worse:

At the same time they are much more satisfied with their own economic well-being, with over 3/4ths saying it's "very good" or "fairly good" and less than 6% saying its "very bad" (hardly fitting the distressed angry voter model):

Rachel Maddow has recently highlighted the significance of the minimum wage as something the GOP/conservative establishment absolutely hates but that the American people love.  Here' how these groups break down, with the Tea Baggers once again as clear outliers:

And as a sort of logical flip-side of such thinking, here's the attitudes toward taxing unearned income, with Tea Baggers once again as outliers, as more than half of them strongly oppose raising such taxes:

It also turns out that Tea Baggers alone are strongly opposed to the Constitution, which says that one of the chief purposes it was created for was to "promote the general welfare".  Almost 3/4ths of Tea Baggers disagree:

Finally, as to how we got into this mess in the first place, once again the Tea Baggers are extreme outliers, as less than 10% of them assign blame to the Bush Administration, compared to almost half of low-income and youth voters and nearly 3/4ths of Blacks:

Finally, on war & peace in Iraq and Afghanistan, once again, the Tea Baggers are outliers. Too bad that Obama is their man, even though no one seems to realize it:

And when it comes to the big picture bottom line, it's no surprise that most folks think the country's headed in the wrong direction, but again, look at how out there the Tea Baggers are:

In short, there can't be any doubt at all that the Tea Baggers represent an extremely atypical democraphic.  Should they be talked about?  Sure.  Should they be talked about as if they were synonymous with the American people?

Not so much.