ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH
Thursday, September 23 2010

Obama patronizes the Tea Party at his own peril
By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Memo to Tea Partiers: President Barack Obama used to think you were a joke. Then he dismissed you as the lunatic fringe. Now that your collective political muscle has jeopardized his control over Congress, he is willing to grant that you are well-intentioned — but confused.

"I think America has a noble tradition of being healthily skeptical about government," the Professor-in-Chief explained Monday at a televised town hall intended to quell voter outrage at his profligate spending and ineffective economic policies. "The problem ... in some of these Tea Party events is, I think they're misidentifying sort of who the culprits are here."

Three guesses as to who that culprit might be. Hint: There's a "W" in his name, and Obama intones it like a mantra whenever someone corners him about his own failures.

"When I arrived," Obama reminded his audience, "... I had a $1.3 trillion deficit wrapped in a bow and waiting for me in the Oval Office."

Members of the Tea Party movement, like most Americans, know all about our ballooning deficit, and they don't like it one bit. But after nearly two years of watching Obama make the problem exponentially worse — by pushing a $787 billion stimulus package that made nary a dent in our unemployment rates or economic woes and ramming Obamacare through Congress despite voter concerns about its exorbitant costs and intrusive mandates — they don't want to hear more whining about what a lousy situation he inherited.

Obama did, after all, campaign for this job. And public approval of his job performance has fallen to the sort of levels that it took George W. Bush years to reach. A new Rasmussen poll finds that only about a quarter of Americans now 'strongly approve" of Obama's performance, while 45 percent 'strongly disapprove." Depending on the survey cited, Republicans now hold a 7- to 10-point lead over Democrats in generic congressional ballots.

Obama's response to this criticism is to play another round of pin-the-blame. At Monday's town hall, he lectured Tea Party activists "to identify, specifically, what would you do?" He suggested that his critics want to cut spending without making the "difficult choices" of deciding which programs to cut.

But Obama's critics already have said what they would do differently than him. They have been saying it since he took office.

Don't pass that bloated stimulus package, they said; it's too costly and sprawling and it won't work. Shelve your plans for an overhaul of health care until we can get our economy back on track and reach consensus around reforms that really work. Don't push for a repeal of the Bush tax cuts just as American business owners — the people who create the jobs we desperately need — are struggling to get back on their feet. Stop spending our tax dollars like monopoly money and calling us selfish for objecting. There's nothing selfish about refusing to saddle our children with crushing debt or defending the principle of limited government upon which this nation was founded. Selfishness is using someone else's money to try to spend your way to popularity, then refusing to take responsibility when your plan backfires.

The Obama administration has tried to cast Tea Partiers as a sinister band of right-wing zealots. But polls suggest that the animating concerns behind this grassroots movement — worries about our faltering economy and leaders passing problems on to the next generation — resonate beyond the bounds of Tea Party protests.

Such concerns surfaced even in the friendly crowd that Obama gathered for his carefully orchestrated town hall appearance. As one African-American professional woman, military veteran and mother told him, "I'm exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for, and deeply disappointed with where we are right now. I have been told that I voted for a man who said he was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class. I'm one of those people. And I'm waiting, sir. I'm waiting."

While America waits for Obama to live up to his own hype, his critics are gaining momentum. It's going to take more than a scolding from the Professor-in-Chief to make them go away.

Colleen Carroll Campbell is a St. Louis-based author, former presidential speechwriter and television and radio host of "Faith & Culture" on EWTN. Her website is www.colleen-campbell.com.