Wednesday, July 08, 2009

McIlheran Gets It on TEA Parties

P-Mac went here and there to find normalcy.

...Tea parties were held in about 21 towns across the state Saturday, follow-ups to the convergence of about 7,000 people on Madison in April. The nonpartisan but conservative Americans for Prosperity, which assisted local organizers, guesstimated they drew 6,000 or so people. If you can draw 6,000 Wisconsinites to hear hours of politics on a day everyone else is grilling brats, you may have a movement. So who were these people?

They weren't especially grumpy nor graying. Crowds were salted liberally with the first-time voters of 2024 and parents holding them. In Mayville, a 22-year-old spoke to roughly 200 people standing in Foster Park as teenagers actually listened. Youngsters waved signs reading things like, "Give me liberty, not debt."

If anything, worries about the deferred costs of bailouts and cap-and-tax energy schemes skew young.

...The one notion around which these disparate newbies united was a suspicion that government on all levels had suddenly become dangerously immodest, consulting neither the people nor constitutional caution. Speakers noted they weren't rallying against taxes, merely against taxes and laws that increase with revolutionary speed. "No" is a perfectly rational answer to recklessness

The rest of the essay is worth reading--P-Mac found a couple of (D) voters who are fretting about this whole "GummintGrows" thing, too.

He must have seen Owen:

The only resistance, we hear, will be a rump of grouchy, graying cranks who will snarl impotently as demographics make the noon of progressivism permanent.

But I've not noticed that Owen is 'graying.'

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