Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) is tone deaf, and obviously not up for reelection this cycle, demonstrated by an op-ed he wrote morning for USA Today entitled “How to fight Tea Party’s faux populism.” He gets in all of the liberal talking points:
History tells us that rage on the right should not be confused with populism. The far right attacks government regulation as it feeds Wall Street and the insurance companies. It rails against government spending for the least privileged as it lavishes tax cuts favoring the most privileged.
What Senator Brown calls “government spending for the least privileged” (which is a number that is growing thanks to President Obama’s policies), we call theft. Regarding creating a pro-business environment – the best type of assistance that we could give anyone on welfare is a job. When is the last time you got a job from a poor person, show of hands anybody?
Regarding tax cuts, both Bush and Reagan tax cuts were across the board, and they worked. Even President John F. Kennedy knew that to bolster an economy that tax cuts needed to be across the board in order to them to be fully effective. Would he even be taken seriously in today’s Democratic Party? Probably not.
So we are angry, we’re angry because of the nonsensical economic polices coming out of Washington that amounts to nothing but generational theft. That is something that should concern all Americans.
I also wonders what history he is looking at? Historically the angry mobs that he wants to paint Tea Partiers as are from the left. We don’t have a history of gathering together which is why the Tea Party movement is so unprecedented.
Yet Senator Brown wants to keep pushing entitlement spending through the roof. He encourages a progressive suicide march bragging about their health care reform and government sector job growth. He wants progressives regressives to talk about these things in “understandable terms” (read lie). No government has ever spent its way to achieve national prosperity, and this is why you have the Tea Party. Because everyday Americans are sick and tired of the lack of fiscal discipline demonstrated by both parties.
It seems to me that Tea Party activists, increasingly influential in the Republican Party, do not seem to much like America the way we are.
Tea Party populism is driven by anger at our government and at our country. Real populism fights for all Americans, while Tea Party populism divides us.
The way we are is broke and indebted to the Chinese. He likes that? We are mad, but we are not as Senator Brown suggests, “mad at the country.” We are mad at a political class that doesn’t want to listen to the people. We don’t like the direction that the political class (of both parties) are taking us, and there is unity in that – look at the polls. So it would seem that the only unity that Senator Brown suggests is one that embraces his ideals. That isn’t unity, it’s submission to economic slavery.
It would seem that Senator Brown has also forgotten that populism takes many forms and it doesn’t always have to embrace leftist ideology. The Tea Party movement is a populist movement in that it does encompass grassroots activism and it is antiestablishment (he neglects to mention the Tea Party has taken down some of the Republican establishment as well).
Senator Brown doesn’t get to change the definition to suit progressives. A strong economy and private sector job growth does more to help the common man than a growing welfare roll.