(Denver Post, Sept. 25) Why are the Democrats so afraid of democracy? Do they worry that the will of the people won’t go their way? So it would seem. Several Colorado court cases illustrate the pattern. The Fenster suit to annul the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights, the Lobato suit to increase education spending, and the ACLU suit to block school choice in Douglas County, all ask unelected judges to substitute their wisdom for that of we the people. Dems are orchestrating each of them, token GOP support notwithstanding. Preferring litigation to legislation is not the only symptom of Democrats’ voter-phobia. The negative propaganda blitz is another. If you’re a liberal and you fear a conservative election wave, crank up the shrill charges and count on echoes from your media allies. Slime the opposition voters until they are delegitimized in public opinion and demoralized in their hearts.
America has never seen this tactic more desperately deployed than in the all-out attack on the Tea Party movement. Which makes sense from the left’s point of view, since the country has not experienced such a surge to the right since the rise of the conservative movement itself, 35 years ago under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Off balance, the Democrats reached for a stopper: race.
A nonpartisan responsibility backlash from the heartland against the bipartisan irresponsibility of Washington, a citizens’ outcry to stop us going off the cliff fiscally and constitutionally – that and nothing more – this phenomenal new force in national politics had to be branded with bigotry when status-quo defenders realized other smears (terrorists, extremists, nihilists, saboteurs) weren’t scary enough.
It started last year – unsuccessfully – and just recently we in the Tea Party had Congressional Black Caucus stalwarts Maxine Waters calling us intimidators who could go to hell and Andre Carson likening us to a KKK lynch mob, while the Rev. Jesse Jackson tagged segregationists in the 1950s as “a tea party” no different from today’s.
On what evidence? None. The sum total of racist incidents ever documented at Tea Party rallies is one jerk with the N-word on a sign in Houston in 2009. Denver saw a bigger and better sample this July, when I held the gavel as hundreds of Tea Party activists from 25 states gathered for the Western Conservative Summit – and a less racist group you could not find.
They gave the presidential straw poll victory to Herman Cain over a dozen white candidates. Listening to Cain, a black businessman, speak against the mess in Washington, the Summit delegates saw character, competence, and charisma – not color.
Meanwhile in Colorado Springs, a young entrepreneur transplanted from Chicago, Derrick Wilburn, has founded the Rocky Mountain Black Tea Party. Its mission, one learns at www.RMBTP.org, is “bringing together persons of color to educate, inform, and encourage true diversity of political thought and expression.”
The group’s well-attended monthly meetings prove that “black and conservative are not mutually exclusive,” says the cheerfully counter-cultural Wilburn. He’s a registered independent who was, like so many Tea Party activists, apolitical until Obama’s leftward lurch alarmed the bejesus out of him two years ago.
Democratic scare-mongers like Reps. Carson and Waters could journey to the foot of Pike’s Peak and learn that the R we care about as Tea Partiers isn’t race, or even Republicans as such. It’s renewed responsibility – restraint in spending and recovery in the economy, so the United States does not become Greece.
We want to use our votes to make sure the land of opportunity isn’t driven into decline while our least-fortunate fellow citizens remain trapped at the bottom. You’d think Democrats, minorities in particular, would want that too. But if it threatened the incumbents’ power and privilege, maybe not. Their party sure has trouble living up to its name.