The Seduction of the Tea Partiers

By ROSS DOUTHAT
NYT

On the surface, the Pledge to America that House Republicans unveiled last week, in obvious imitation of Newt Gingrich’s famous Contract With America, feels like a triumph for the Tea Party.

Whereas the Gingrich-era contract was a terse, 865-word list of legislative priorities, the 2010 pledge reads like an expansive, even radical manifesto. It runs to almost 8,000 words, bristles with charts and graphs and inspiring quotations, and includes a lengthy preamble modeled on the Declaration of Independence. And whereas the original contract’s language was carefully poll-tested to appeal to squishy moderates, the pledge has the aggressively small-government tone of a Rand Paul stump speech, complete with attacks on “self-appointed elites,” praise for Americans’ speaking out “in town halls and on public squares,” and pledges “to honor the Constitution as constructed by its framers.”

But style can be deceiving. House Republicans have adopted the atmospherics of the Tea Party movement, but they’ve evaded its most admirable substance.

The Tea Party is a grass-roots movement — wild, woolly and chaotic — which sometimes makes it hard to figure out exactly what it stands for. But to the extent that the movement boasts a single animating idea, it’s the conviction that the Republicans as much as the Democrats have been an accessory to the growth of spending and deficits, and that the Republican establishment needs to be punished for straying from fiscal rectitude.

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