Poll after poll keeps revealing the same results when it comes to the tea party movement. Newt Gingrich's Winston Group unveiled a new poll and what we learn is that they are conservatives that are more extreme than usual and who are much angrier than the rest of them at the moment and as C&L has said over and over again, were created by FOX News.
The individuals who make up the Tea Party movement are largely conservative and get their news from Fox; they're generally old and of moderate to low income; and they're fairly convinced that their taxes are going to rise in the next few years, even though they likely won't.
Those conclusions are part of a new study put together by The Winston Group, a conservative-leaning polling and strategy firm run by the former director of planning for former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. And they provide a telling new window on the political force that has revamped the Republican Party and altered the landscape of the 2010 elections.
In the course of conducting three national surveys of 1,000 registered voters, Winston was able to peg the percentage of the public that identifies itself with the Tea Party at roughly 17 percent. The group pledges that it is independent of any particular party (indeed 28 percent of Tea Party respondents in the Winston survey labeled their affiliation as such). But on pretty much every defining political or demographic issue, the movement lines up with the GOP or conservative alternatives.
Sixty-five percent of Tea Party respondents called themselves "conservative" compared to the 33 percent of all respondents who did the same. Just eight percent of Tea Party respondents said they were "liberal."
Forty-seven percent of Tea Party respondents said that Fox News was either the top or second source of news they turn to, compared with 19 percent of the overall public who said the same thing.
FOX News got the ball rolling and when times are tough, people will side with something that has been marketed as different so their ranks slowly pick up unhappy Americans. I keep hearing teabaggers on TV say that they want to take over the Republican party and get back to their true conservative roots. Does anybody know what that even means? Ronald Reagan raised taxes on Americans more than once:
The first Reagan tax increase came in 1982. By then it was clear that the budget projections used to justify the 1981 tax cut were wildly optimistic. In response, Mr. Reagan agreed to a sharp rollback of corporate tax cuts, and a smaller rollback of individual income tax cuts. Over all, the 1982 tax increase undid about a third of the 1981 cut; as a share of G.D.P., the increase was substantially larger than Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax increase.
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Mr. Reagan's second tax increase was also motivated by a sense of responsibility -- or at least that's the way it seemed at the time. I'm referring to the Social Security Reform Act of 1983, which followed the recommendations of a commission led by Alan Greenspan. Its key provision was an increase in the payroll tax that pays for Social Security and Medicare hospital insurance. For many middle- and low-income families, this tax increase more than undid any gains from Mr. Reagan's income tax cuts...
Since Reagan is their Lord and Master, how would he fair in this climate if he raised taxes? Ronald would be vilified by the teabaggers and the entire conservative movement. So what conservative principles are tea partiers talking about when they long for the good old days?
These people sound like the Daleks and Cyberman from Dr. Who. One group thinks they are purer than the other and so they must be destroyed. Isn't that what Auntie Pam said on Letterman?
They were angry that they lost the 2008 election and got even angrier because an African American was the one to beat them.
The teabaggers aren't really populists or libertarians although their "ideology" contains a smattering of incomprehensible slogans from both populist and libertarian thinking. They are conservative movement robots, which isn't really ideological at all but rather an emotional outlet for resentment and anger at all the "others" who these adherents believe are either getting ahead at their expense or looking down their elitist noses at them. It's really not about politics at all.
The policies they robotically proclaim all Republicans should follow would only cause their lives more pain, but then as the hardship grew worse---they still would be brainwashed by FOX. Poor Big Business is not given enough respect in the country and the government sucks. In each scenario, Grover Norquist's vision wins out.
