Liberal Washington has spent much of the last week denouncing the Tea Party movement, which completed a series of rallies around the nation with one big one at the Washington Monument on April 15, the day tax returns were due.<\/p>\n
We all know the particulars. \u00a0A week ago Bill Clinton used a Sunday New York Times<\/em> op-ed slyly to equate the Tea Partiers with the Oklahoma City bomber. \u00a0\u00a0Out of other leftward quarters came charges of racism. \u00a0Generally there was a mix of handwringing and scorn.<\/p>\n The goal seemed to be to identify the Republican Party with this grassroots uprising against spending, deficits, and government control of the economy. \u00a0Apparently the geniuses in the Democratic Party apparatus thought this a way to put the GOP on the defensive going into the November elections.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Politico released its exit poll<\/a> of demonstrators leaving the Tax Day Tea Party rally. Spending and deficits were at the top of their list of concerns. \u00a0Social issues (specifically gay marriage) stood at the bottom.<\/p>\n But it is more than that.<\/p>\n Something very big is going on in the nation. \u00a0The Tea Partiers are part of it, but only part.<\/p>\n During the three weeks in which the Tea Party Express was making its way, rally by rally, from Searchlight, Nevada, home of Senator Majority Leader Harry Reid, to DC, polls and media stories were confirming a growing tide in public opinion.<\/p>\n National concern about spending and debt was rising. \u00a0The sense was growing that, at least on these fiscal issues, the government has acted beyond the limits of the national consensus and without concern for the nation\u2019s future or the limits of its own competence.<\/p>\n Last Monday Rasmussen reported<\/a><\/a> that 56 percent of voters continue to want the signature legislation of the Obama Administration\u2019s first two years \u2013 the health overhaul \u2013 repealed. \u00a0\u00a0The number feeling this way has been high ever since the legislation passed. \u00a0But Democrats had assumed it would go down in time. \u00a0It hasn\u2019t. \u00a0It may even be rising.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Pollster.com has shown a gap in generic Congressional vote preferences (the answer to the question, \u201cif the election were held today, would you vote for the Republican or the Democratic candidate for Congress\u201d without using candidate names) opening up in favor of Republicans. \u00a0By the end of last week this averaging of all polls<\/a> was reporting a spread of three percent, with support for Democrats headed sharply downward.<\/p>\n Now the liberal media has begun to take note. \u00a0Yesterday, The New York Times<\/em> ran a front-page story<\/a> on supposedly secure Congressional Democrats who are in hard reelection fights, in some cases for the first time in their careers. \u00a0The story focused on Wisconsin congressman David Obey, who is in his forty-second year in the House of Representatives and must surely qualify as the most secure of the secure. If both he and Senator Reid are in trouble, the entire nation may be looking like Scott Brown\u2019s Massachusetts by November, full of hitherto unimaginable upsets.<\/p>\n