Why Kurtz, McConnell, and the Establishment Media Are Wrong

Really good analysis of Kurtz' "Media Blew It" post.

Core:

I suspect Kurtz feels bolstered by routine polls in identifying “the economy” as the main worry of the voters in the growing Obama backlash – and for some of the voters that may be the case. But it is emphatically not the case for Tea Party voters.

The polls never offer respondents the option Tea Party voters would choose as their biggest concern. Perhaps that’s because the typical polling organization wouldn’t even know how to phrase it. “Constitutional liberties” would be one way to put it. That expression gets across the central issue of liberty, and it tethers that issue to the U.S. Constitution, and hence to the trends and actions of government that are of practical relevance to American citizens. Tea Party voters aren’t suffering from Kurtz’s “inchoate” anger, nor are their concerns captured by the polling themes that have been conventional for the last 50-odd years or more. Their anger is grounded in the excesses of the federal government observed throughout most of our lifetimes, but startlingly and dramatically accelerated by Barack Obama and his Democratic congressional majority.

In other words, they ask the wrong questions. It's the same blindness that infests the mind of McConnell--and even, to some degree, Scott Walker, whose indirect repudiation of local-control for school districts betrays the "State Knows All" thought-pattern of the ......ahhhh.......Elected Ones.

Wrong questions based on wrong assumptions: wrong answers.