What bothers me the most about these so-called "grass roots" movements is the obfuscation. It ain't "grass roots" if the office is in D.C. and the funding comes from large corporations!
Tea Party's roots lie in backlash against Obama
Real-estate agent Theresa Garcia told me of how candidate Obama made her "uncomfortable" the first time she watched him on TV, while her husband, Alex, tried to convince me that the overwhelming win in Delaware in 2008 by Obama and native son Joe Biden wasn't legitimate because their majority came from "the handout people" in Wilmington.
The leader of the 9-12 Patriots, retired trucker and Vietnam vet Russ Murphy, said he'd been energized by reports on Fox News playing up Obama's contacts with '60s radical William Ayers and told me that Obama was "fundamentally not American," questioning his credentials to serve as commander-in-chief.
The increasing federal debt and the growth of big government? That issue barely came up.
But that was not the Tea Party that I found as I ventured to places like the gunpowder-tinged Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot in Kentucky, where vendors openly sold Photoshopped pictures of Obama getting a back rub from Adolf Hitler and attendees insisted the president would confiscate their weapons, to a swank Nashville, Tennessee, ballroom where Sarah Palin netted a cool $100,000 from the masses of Tea Party Nation, pledging she would give it back to the cause.
Indeed, people miss the entire point about the backlash when they try to define it strictly through a political prism. At the end of the day, the Tea Party movement is mainly rooted in a cultural revolution, whipped by winds of anxiety and fear -- not just about the loss of so many middle-class jobs in America, but also about sweeping demographic and cultural change in America.
Read more at www.cnn.com
