New America Media, Commentary, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Posted: Aug 06, 2011

Moments after President Obama put his John Hancock on the debt-ceiling deal, a Northern California Tea Party member claimed that when he proudly wore his Tea Party t-shirt to his local grocery store, half a dozen people immediately asked him how to join.

If one believes the legion of pundits who claim with smug assurance that the Tea Party, and by extension the GOP, cut its political throat by holding the White House, Congress and the nation hostage for weeks until it got its way on the debt deal, the Tea Party member in the grocery store is either the biggest liar on the planet or suffers from advanced political dyslexia.

Unfortunately, there’s really no reason to think anything of the sort. A quick look at the checklist of what Congress gave up tells why: 
Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the chopping block; no extension of unemployment insurance benefits; no tax loopholes closed; no new tax and revenue hikes approved; no guarantee that any substantial military spending will be cut; creation of a so-called super-committee that can virtually unilaterally chop off billions more in spending from vital education, health, transportation, and infrastructure development programs that Congress is powerless to do nothing more than take it or leave it; no spending authorization to create jobs; and worst of all, the real possibility that within a few months Congress and the White House will be locked again in another round of fiscal sumo wrestling.

The manufacture of the phony debt-ceiling and fiscal crisis, the gutting of federal spending and by extension the federal government, the mocking of the political process to engage in this financial charade—all this was the handiwork of the Tea Party, a party that its short existence has managed to play the nation, the White House, Congress, and the media like a finely tuned Stradivarius. The Tea Party marvelously hijacked the political process with one goal in mind, a goal that it never bothered to hide: to hector, harass, embarrass, and ultimately insure that President Obama is a one-term president.

The seeds of the Tea Party’s hijacking of the Congressional budget were planted the instant President Obama took the oath of office. Tea Party leaders shrewdly reached back three decades and revived a simple theme from the Reagan years. Liberal Democrats had constructed a wasteful, out-of- control, and inefficient Big Government that had bloated the budget with deficit crushing spending on education, health, and infrastructure programs. The underlying implication was that the spending was lavished almost exclusively on minorities and the poor. And the people forced to bear the cost for the alleged Big Government spending spree were the hard-pressed, overburdened, overtaxed white middle and working class.

This was of course pure mythmaking. The Congressional Budget Office put debt and debt servicing costs at less than 2 percent of America’s economic output (aka the gross domestic product, or GDP). That figure is lower than at any point since the 1970s. The payments on federal debt under Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bill Clinton presidencies were above 3 percent of GDP. Only under G. W. Bush did that figure dropped.

There was no talk of a federal debt collapse in those years. But within one year of the Obama adminisration, the hysteria began, and now the U.S. was said to face financial Armageddon if trillions weren’t hacked from the budget. This, of course, was almost exclusively the talk of the Tea Party, which made their views the talk of Congress and the nation, with only scattered dissent from a handful of lawmakers. The Tea Party got its way not merely because it adroitly waylaid an issue to politically sabotage a president, but because it out-screamed, out-marched, and out-organized Democrats and its own GOP mainstream.

A recent Pew Research Center poll found that Tea Party adherents were twice as likely as other Americans to be engaged in the debate over the budget, blitzing their elected representatives with faxes, emails, and phones calls to stand firm. By a near 2-to-1 margin, Tea Party backers followed the news about the budget deliberations more intently than those who opposed the Tea Party.

Yet despite the Tea Party's obvious budget triumph, some are foolishly crowing that this victory actually marks the party’s demise. That's the kind of demise that established political parties would salivate over. Far from writing the epitaph for the Tea Party, pundits should focus on the ugly truth. The Tea Party has forced the White House, and Congress and a nation to look over its shoulder in nervous jitters at every overblown, clownish, and destructive scheme that its backers decide to dump on the nation's plate. And make no mistake—there are more, many more, of those schemes to come.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio Network. He is an associate editor of New America Media. He is host of the weekly Hutchinson Report Newsmaker Hour on KTYM Radio Los Angeles streamed on ktym.com podcast on blogtalkradio.com and internet TV broadcast on thehutchinsonreportnews.com
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