Obama battles reactionary ‘Tea Party’ activists in US

US politics is on a war-footing as President Obama battles a hostile Right-wing group called ‘The Tea Party’ reacting vehemently against his broader-based social policies.

The challengers comprised mostly of upper middle class wealthier and slightly more educated activists, holding protest rallies mimicking the anti-British Boston Tea Party, staged by US colonies in 1773. This looked nothing more than class-warfare, most analysts observed.

The Tea Party’s standard bearers have paraded in thousands in many cities also defying Obama’s consensual approach to foreign policy as being a drift from their avowed theme of US global primacy.

Barack Obama	Sarah Palin	George W. Bush

Many of them project an anachronistic narrowness of vision rejecting the notion of being stakeholders in a pluralistic, multi-cultural and nonjudgmental era. They denounced Obama for being apologetic about ‘American exceptionalism.’ No such outrage erupted when resources were drained away by the misguided Bush war in Iraq.

Tea Partyers cringed when policies like healthcare were passed by the US Congress after an 18-month debate. They unashamedly rejected even a semblance of social-sharing threatening to ‘win back the country from the socialist way of the current occupant of the White House.’ They dismissed climate change legislation as unwanted rubbish.

The Tea Party started with a small white, male, married and older than 45-group and majority of them Republican who burst onto the scene a year ago protesting the economic stimulus package passed by Obama administration as an antidote to the recession.

The Tea Party has vowed to purge even the Republican Party of officials they considered not sufficiently conservative and not doing enough to block the Obama’s agenda on the economy, the environment and healthcare.

Former Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin recently published an electoral map of Democratic Party Congressmen to be marked as targets for retribution during 2010 November mid-term elections.

Obvious double standard

They staged many protests on April 15 - the day Americans pay their annual income taxes.

It was the British Government who were the enemy then. Now it is the ‘socialist Obama administration’. Most Americans, however, believe that taxes they pay were fair but Tea Party folks were making a different statement.

The double standard is obvious. The Tea Party members are enjoying the benefits of Social Security and Medicare (government pension and lowered healthcare costs) that account for 30 percent of the US Budget. Most of them send their children to public schools and are not reluctant to use the vast array of education endowments and scholarships available to most Americans.

Over 50 percent of them collectively believed that policies of the Obama administration favour the poor, and 25 percent think that the administration prefers blacks over whites - compared with 11 percent of the general public according to a recent survey by the New York Times.

Class antagonisms seemed to be embodied in their rhetoric and some even came close to being racists. They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people by the Obama administration.

Disguised sedition

Many seem to think that the only way they could stop the government spending money on the less affluent people was by revolting. A 66-year-old semi-retired lawyer in Florida said in an interview after the poll. “I’m sick and tired of them wasting money and doing what our founders never intended to be done with the federal government.” There is an air of disguised sedition emanating from some of the Tea Party rallies.

Their favourite slogan is that ‘the country is headed in the wrong direction’. They blame the current administration for the recession and everything else rather than the Bush policies that plunged the country into the expensive war against Iraq and running the largest budget deficit in history.

The vast majority of the Tea Party followers seemed to claim exclusive authorship of social values in denouncing attempts by the government to better the conditions of the have-nots.

Recently, when interviewed a retired medical transcriber in Jacksonville said “I just feel Obama’s getting away from what America is. He’s a socialist. And to tell you the truth, I think he’s a Muslim and trying to head us in that direction, I don’t care what he says. He’s been in office over a year and can’t find a church to go to. That doesn’t say much for him.”

Obama takes fight to the Opposition

President Obama has not budged from his positions and taken the battle to the opposing camp proposing a major overhaul of the financial system which is now being debated in the Senate. The real answer to the critics would come as the economy recovers and the job situation become rosier in the months ahead.

Martin Luther King Jr

* Birth: January 15, 1929 * Death: April 4, 1968 (aged 39) * Movement: African-American Civil Rights Movement and Peace movement * Notable prizes: Nobel Peace Prize (1964), Presidential Medal of Freedom

Tea party antics would not stand the test of time due to another reason. Trying to advance the overarching cause of liberty and justice by the Tea Party folks got annihilated in the face of notions indicating that less unfortunate people were deemed disposable. Tea Party attempts to endow their actions with a convenient moral gloss has failed.

They were ignoring centuries of efforts to end enslavement, a freedom fight amidst a devastating Civil War and political turmoil of reconstruction under Lincoln, followed by disfranchisement, segregation and, finally, the struggle for equality by men like Martin Luther King.

Their rationale is not good governance for all but make-believe-dreams of perfect happiness for few defined in terms of consumption, celebrity, unencumbered individual choice and the gratification of personal appetites. For them people power is bandying a lifestyle which is gradually losing its charm even among the Americans with a broader grasp of the meaning of overall happiness.