Michael Barone‘s latest Washington Examiner report offers an interesting comparison between the long-serving Democrats and Tea Party-inspired political newcomers competing in many of the election contests across the country:
One of the constant refrains of the so-called mainstream media is that tea party candidates are blithering incompetents and weird wackos. They may do well this year, the refrain goes, but when voters come to their senses the Republican party will pay a big price for embracing them.
This meme is part of a pattern. As longtime Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, now writing for The Daily Beast, puts it, “News organizations were late to the tea party phenomenon and are still grappling to explain it.”
As on so many points, I think the mainstream media has gotten it nearly upside down. What strikes me about so-called tea party candidates–those with little or no political experience who have won Republican nominations by opposing the Obama Democrats’ vast expansion of government–is not that some of them are bumblers but that so many of them seem to have terrific political instincts.
You might remember that Barone discussed Tea Party activists during his most recent interview with Carolina Journal Radio:
