Thread: Palin on TEA party

TRX
06-08-2010
Palin: Tea Partiers "Have to Pick a Party" - CBS News

<snip> Palin: Tea Partiers "Have to Pick a Party"

In Arkansas, Former Alaska Governor Heaps Praise on Movement, But Says U.S. Has A Two-Party System

By Scott Conroy

(CBS) In front of a crowd of Republican Party activists and the tea-party movement's rank and file here on Tuesday night, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin seemed to put a damper on speculation that she might consider running for president in 2012 as a third-party candidate.

Asked what her advice would be to conservatives as the November elections approach, Palin first lavished praise on the Tea Party movement, calling it "a grand movement" and adding, "I love it because it's all about the people."

But she quickly pivoted to the broader question of whether the Tea Party movement might successfully field its own candidates in national elections, and on that point she sounded far from convinced.

"Now the smart thing will be for independents who are such a part of this Tea Party movement to, I guess, kind of start picking a party," Palin said. "Which party reflects how that smaller, smarter government steps to be taken? Which party will best fit you? And then because the Tea Party movement is not a party, and we have a two-party system, they're going to have to pick a party and run one or the other: "R" or "D"."

</snip>

[full text at link above]

Hello? Mrs. Palin? The reason people are out demonstrating is that they're fed up with your party. And the other one, too.

I'm old enough to remember when the South was solid Democrat. Now it's mostly Republican. But guess what? We haven't changed. The Democratic Party abandoned us. The Republicans got in by default. And frankly, we don't like them all that much either.

And we're not the only ones.

The Big Two are top-down structures, where the party bosses set the platform and dictate to the rest what is going to happen. It worked in the days of primitive communications, but now the voters are quite capable of organizing themselves, without help of a party bureaucracy.

Your party structure is so eaten up with itself it doesn't bother to listen to the people it claims to represent. You don't listen to us... and surprise! We're not paying attention to you either.

TRX
06-11-2010
The essence of the TEA movement comes down to "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it any more."

As far as I know the Ds and Rs don't even bother with political rallies around here. Nobody shows up. "They don't call, they don't write..." - if they get a few dozen letters on some major subject, it's a big deal. So when you get a citizen group who can get hundreds of people to take off work and show up for a rally, that's earthquake-level news.

Instead of waking up and smelling the coffee, they stick their heads back in the sand and ignore it, or denounce it.