I don’t think they get it

Just last week I wrote about the Atlanta Tea Party event. Since then there has been a lot of chatter from the media trying to dissect exactly what happened on 4/15/2009.

The general questions are:

• What were those Tea Party events?
• What are those people complaining about?
• What types of people attended those events?
• Who organized the events?

From the “fair and balanced” Fox News to the ultra liberal NBC News the media in general just doesn’t get it. You can tell by the articles being written and the news programs being aired that this new grassroots movement is being misunderstood.

The people being interviewed for commentary on the Tea Parties are struggling to wrap their arms around the events. I can understand the problem with defining the movement. When you have hundreds of thousands of people trying to be heard all at the same time the message gets lost in the translation. 

It’s like 250,000 10th graders trying to define “amore.” To a 10th grader amore is pizza. The Tea Party activist are trying to define exactly what America is to its people. Try wrapping your hands around that!

As an example - here is a clear translation problem:

Yesterday Fox News reported that David Axelrod who is a senior Obama advisor said “The thing that bewilders me is this president just cut taxes for 95 percent of the American people. So I think the tea bags should be directed elsewhere because he certainly understands the burden that the people face.”

I have heard that exact statement several times since the tea parties occurred. It must be a new White House talking point because it is repeated over and over again. The funny thing is every time they (they = other than tea party activist) use that statement it DRIVES home the point that another tea party event is needed.

Let me make one point before I continue… The people at the tea parties are not misguided and do understand the policies being proposed by today’s politicians. Their direction is clear, however the movement has not found clear leadership. Once the national leadership is in place the message can be clearly translated and then properly delivered.

I’ll give you a reference point to begin the translation…

Last week I wrote that the 4/15/2009 events had a message of “Shut up and Listen. You work for us, we don’t work for you!” But what are “we” saying? (We = those attending and participating in a Tea Party event).

Much has been written that the “we” in last week’s events included Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, Moderates, and Conservatives. Within those groups there are a multitude of programs and policies that each individual group would like to see occur.

Some want a strong national defense, some want entitlement reform, some are strict constitutionalists, some may even want universal health care -  the list of wants goes on and on.

So what are “we” saying in this initial translation… The message is not what we want; the message is what do we need. The Tea Party activists realize that socialist ideas, even the ones that sound good to certain groups of Tea Party attendees, cost money. And even though some in the crowd may want some of the programs, every single person in the crowd knew… we don’t need any new programs and we certainly can’t afford them.

The people in the crowd understand how government and life in general works. You can’t get something for nothing. If you plan on buying something, a road, a bridge, universal health care, social security, then you need to find the money - and “we” in the crowd don’t want our kids paying for unsustainable inefficient programs.

The crowd understands that even if the Obama administration took employer and employee payroll taxes to 0% you still would have had Tea Party events around the country. The crowd understands you would still have to get the money somewhere to pay for the new programs.

The crowd understands that holding expenditures on entitlements at today’s dollars for a period of 5 years is not a tax cut. That raising the taxes on a pack of cigarettes is NOT cutting taxes for 95% of Americans. That asking federal department heads to cut programs while allowing their overall budgets to increase is not a “savings.”

The crowd understands that a Cap and Trade energy policy is a TAX not a policy.

The initial translation from the Tea Party crowd is every time our government open’s its mouth to propose a new program we are getting taxation with misrepresentation. Now that is a whole lot different than taxation without representation.

The Tea Party activists are trying to say that there is a difference between wants and needs, a difference between a tax and a tax cut, and there is a clear difference between representation and misrepresentation.

To all Tea Party activists in the crowd, have a heart and keep pushing. The thought that “they” don’t get it doesn’t mean that “they” won’t get it. In a representative government they work for us, they just don’t know it yet.

This entry was posted on 20. April 2009 at 17:43 and is filed under Message. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.