- The Origins of the Tea Party
(excerpt)
RUSH: ...There was a group back in the 1990s -- and they still exist.
There was a group in the 1990s that were malcontents, renegades, and off the mainstream plantation of conservatism as articulated by the party.
Those were the people that were the early participants in the website Free Republic.
They were known as Freepers.
They were...
- I say all this in a positive sense. I don't want any negative connotation.
But they were one of the first visible groups of people off the reservation.- And by that I mean abandoning the Republican Party's confined definitions of conservatism.
I think Clinton inspired a lot of that.
It went somewhat dormant during the Bush years.
But even then these people were very distressed at what they were seeing on the spending side.
They were really, really troubled because of what it was going to mean to their kids and their grandkids, all this debt.
It was going to impede the creation of wealth as the government grew bigger and became more and more in debt,
the government swallowed more and more of the private sector.
The private sector is where opportunity is for average people.
For the middle class, the private sector is where growth is, the growth opportunity, the pie that gets bigger and your piece of it.
It's the middle class. It's not in government.
It's in the private sector. It was shrinking.
Obama comes along and just nuclear weapons everything everybody's already afraid of.
He adds a nuclear charge to it.
First the stimulus came, and then Obamacare was always a subject in the campaign.
Everybody opposed to Obama knew that he wanted it, and at first it seemed like nationalized health care was not gonna happen no matter what.
In the first two years, Obama owned the House, and he had the Senate, and he still couldn't get it done.
It was harder and harder to get it done, and there was still a little bit of confidence that it wouldn't happen.
As it became clear that it was going to happen and then did happen,
- I think (solely based on my memory) the combination of Obama and all of the spending, all the debt,
and the lack of push-back from the Republican Party, led to the Tea Party.
They felt like there was no representation.
- Obama is elected, then inaugurated, and they hear everybody in the Republican Party salivating and trying to get in on it
by complimenting and praising Obama and all of his cabinet selections.
I remember the Republicans said Eric Holder was a great appointment, all these Republican legal minds.
To average, ordinary Americans in the Republican Party it was shocking and frightening that there was no push-back.
There was abject fear. You could see it.
The Republican Party was scared to death of criticizing Obama, of opposing Obama.
They were scared to death, intimidated out of the fear of being called racists.
Their voters were just fit to be tied over this, because they weren't afraid of that.
Finally, if you can say there was a tipping point, it was Obamacare which caused this group of people --
- many of whom had never ever been involved in politics outside the ballot box
The Republican Party didn't know what to do with them.
The Republican Party was afraid of them.
The biggest mistake the Republican Party made in 2010 was not embracing them.
I look back on that today and I'm more and more puzzled and amazed.
- Well, I'm not puzzled. I know why.
I mean, here you have a made-to-order, motivated, energized, activist, willing-to-donate millions of people that you could welcome into the fold.
You could build a movement around them, and the Republican Party was as uninterested as the Democrats were interested in destroying them.
I think that just fired up the Tea Party people even more.
Then as time has gone on, the Tea Party people have figured out what others in the Republican base have figured out,
- and that is the Republicans are really not that crazy about 'em being in the party,
- because they embarrass them, or something.
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