The remarkable election in Massachusetts and the broader tea party movement have, as do all major political shifts, many roots. People worry over the surge in government spending. They object to the provisions of the health care reform legislation and the atypically corrupt way that the Democratic leadership tried to shove it through congress, and still might. They worry over budget deficits and what they might do to the economy. They fret whether all these actions will unleash a wealth destroying inflation. But there is something more fundamental at work here, too, less concerned with legislative or economic specifics or with party. People have at last tired of being told by Washington and the academic establishments on which it relies that they have betters who know what they need better than they do. They are, quite simply, fed up with the anti-democratic, elitist, condescending, arrogant, insulting approach to governing that has prevailed through both Republican and Democratic administrations but that has become stark in the Obama White House and the Pelosi-Reid congress.
The people of Massachusetts must have felt great passion to do what they did this past January. Many voted as they never have before, nor their parents, nor their grandparents. Such action takes great conviction. For years they seemed to behave like sheep, supporting the Kennedy-Harvard nexus, accepting the notion that Teddy and the professors knew better, except that Kennedy, for all his many excesses and faults, could convincingly appear as if he were listening, enough to soften an othewise smug sense of superiority and entitlement. But with Teddy’s passing, this old sleight of hand ceased to work. Coakley’s inept campaign only drove the point home harder. Democratic Party leadership expected them to fall into line as before and take what they were given. But even if the Democrats had put up someone with more political acumen than Coakey, which in retrospect would not have been difficult, it probably would not have changed the result. Massachusetts voters still had before them the stark picture of overpowering arrogance in the White House and in congress. They said, “no.”
It is this horrible arrogance that formed the base of the reaction in the Bay State and that forms the base of the tea party movement that seems destined to play such a large role in the 2010 mid-term elections. It goes beyond party. It is about respect. All the insults hurled by Pelosi, Reid, Obama, and their minions have only reinforced people’s conviction that this leadership has no regard for the opinions of others, especially the people. William Buckley famously said that he would rather be ruled by the first 100 names in the Boston telephone directory than the faculty at Harvard, or words to that effect. It was not contempt for Harvard that led him to make such a statement. Rather, it was Harvard’s contempt for the rest of us. The people of Massachusetts saw that contempt in today’s political leadership. The people in the tea party movement see it, too.
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