[Rich's best column in years]
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/17/opinion/17rich.html
The New York Times
January 17, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
The Great Tea Party Rip-Off
By FRANK RICH
Even given the low bar set by America's bogus conversations about race,
the short-lived Harry Reid fracas was a most peculiar nonevent. For all
the hyperventilation in cable news land, this supposed racial brawl
didn't seem to generate any controversy whatsoever in what is known as
the real world.
Eugene Robinson, the liberal black columnist at The Washington Post,
wrote that he was "neither shocked nor outraged" at Reid's
less-than-articulate observation that Barack Obama benefited
politically from being "light-skinned" and for lacking a "Negro dialect
unless he wanted to have one." Besides, Robinson said, Reid's point was
"surely true." The black conservative Ward Connerly agreed, writing in
The Wall Street Journal that he was "having a difficult time
determining what it was that Mr. Reid said that was so offensive."
President Obama immediately granted Reid absolution. A black columnist
at The Daily News in New York, Stanley Crouch, even stood up for the
archaic usage of "Negro." George Will defended Reid from charges of
racism as vociferously as Democrats did. Al Sharpton may have accepted
Reid's apology, but for once there's no evidence that he ever cared
enough to ask for one. So who, actually, was the aggrieved party here?
What -- or who -- was really behind this manufactured race war with no
victims?
It would be easy to dismiss the entire event as a credulous news
media's collaboration with a publisher's hype for a new tell-all-gossip
2008 campaign book, "Game Change," which breathlessly broke the Reid
"bombshell." But this is a more interesting tale than that. The true
prime mover in this story was not a book publicist but Michael Steele,
the chairman of the Republican Party and by far the loudest and most
prominent Beltway figure demanding that Reid resign as Senate majority
leader as punishment for his "racism."
Steele is widely regarded as a clown by observers of all political
persuasions, but he is clownish like a fox. His actions in this
incident offer some hilarious and instructive insights into what's
going on in the Republican hierarchy right now as it tries to cope not
just with our first African-American president but with a restive base
embracing right-wing tea-party populism that loathes the establishment
in both parties. And though Steele is black, and perhaps the most
enthusiastic player of the race card in American politics today, race
was a red herring in his Reid vendetta. It threw most everyone off the
scent of his real motivation, which had nothing to do with black versus
white but everything to do with green, as in money.
A profligate spender, Steele had inaugurated his arrival as party
chairman by devoting nearly $20,000 to redecorate his office because he
found it "way too male" for his sensitive tastes. In the weeks just
before "Game Change" emerged, Steele was in more hot water. Over the
holidays, G.O.P. elders were shocked to learn that their front man had
a side career as a motivational public speaker at up to $20,000 a gig.
The party treasury, which contained $22.8 million upon Steele's arrival
at the end of January 2009, was down to $8.7 million by late November,
with 2010 campaign expenditures rapidly arriving. "He needs to raise
money for the party, not his wallet," one Republican leader griped to
Politico.
Then, just after New Year, Steele published an unexpected book of his
own, "Right Now: A 12-Step Program for Defeating the Obama Agenda." He
hadn't told his employers that the book was in the works, and, to add
further insult, he attacks unnamed party leaders in its pages for
forsaking conservative principles. Since it hit the stores, Steele has
pursued a book tour for fun and personal profit, all the while daring
his G.O.P. critics to bring it on. "If you don't want me in the job,
fire me," he taunted them. "But until then, shut up. Get with the
program, or get out of the way."
Fire him? Steele knows better than anyone that his party can't afford
what Clarence Thomas might call a "high-tech lynching" of the only
visible black guy it has in even a second-tier office. Steele has said
that white Republicans are "scared" of him. They are. He loves to play
head games with their racial paranoia and insecurities, whether he's
publicly professing "slum love" for the Indian-American Louisiana
governor, Bobby Jindal, or starting a blog on the R.N.C. site titled
"What Up?," or announcing that he would use "fried chicken and potato
salad" to recruit minority voters. As long as the G.O.P. remains
largely a whites-only country club, Steele has job security. But he had
real reason to fear some new restraints on the cash box; last year the
party was driven to write a rule requiring him to get approval for
expenditures over $100,000.
On Jan. 9 The Washington Post ran a front-page article headlined
"Frustrations With Steele Leaving G.O.P. in a Bind," reporting, among
other embarrassments, that the party had spent $90 million during
Steele's brief reign while raising just $84 million. Enter "Game
Change," right in the nick of time for Steele to pull off his own
cunning game change. On Jan. 10 he stormed "Fox News Sunday" and "Meet
the Press" to demand Reid's head. There has been hardly a mention of
Steele's sins since. He can laugh all the way to the bank.
His behavior is not anomalous. Steele is representative of a
fascinating but little noted development on the right: the rise of
buckrakers who are exploiting the party's anarchic confusion and
divisions to cash in for their own private gain. In this cause, Steele
is emulating no one if not Sarah Palin, whose hunger for celebrity and
money outstrips even his own. As many suspected at the time, her 2008
campaign wardrobe, like the doomed campaign itself, was just a preview
of coming attractions: she would surely dump the bother of serving as
Alaska's besieged governor for a lucrative star turn on Fox News. Last
week she made it official.
Both Steele and Palin claim to be devotees of the tea party movement.
"I'm a tea partier, I'm a town-haller, I'm a grass-roots-er" is how
Steele put it in a recent radio interview, wet-kissing a market he
hopes will buy his book. Palin has far more grandiose ambitions. She
recently signed on as a speaker for the first Tea Party Convention,
scheduled next month in Nashville -- even though she had turned down a
speaking invitation from the annual Conservative Political Action
Conference, the traditional meet-and-greet for the right. The
conservative conference doesn't pay. The Tea Party Convention does. A
blogger at Nashville Scene reported that Palin's price for the event
was $120,000.
The entire Tea Party Convention is a profit-seeking affair charging
$560 a ticket -- plus the cost of a room at the Opryland Hotel. Among
the convention's eight listed sponsors is Tea Party Emporium, which
gives as its contact address 444 Madison Avenue in New York, also home
to the high-fashion brand Burberry. This emporium's Web site offers a
bejeweled tea bag at $89.99 for those furious at "a government hell
bent on the largest redistribution of wealth in history." This is
almost as shameless as Glenn Beck, whose own tea party profiteering has
included hawking gold coins merchandised by a sponsor of his radio
show.
Last week a prominent right-wing blogger, Erick Erickson of
RedState.com, finally figured out that the Tea Party Convention "smells
scammy," likening it to one of those Nigerian e-mails promising untold
millions. Such rumbling about the movement's being co-opted by
hucksters may explain why Palin used her first paid appearance at Fox
last Tuesday to tell Bill O'Reilly that she would recycle her own tea
party profits in political contributions. But Erickson had it right:
the tea party movement is being exploited -- and not just by marketers,
lobbyists, political consultants and corporate interests but by the
Republican Party, as exemplified by Palin and Steele, its most
prominent leaders.
Tea partiers hate the G.O.P. establishment and its Wall Street allies,
starting with the Bushies who created TARP, almost as much as they do
Obama and his Wall Street pals. When Steele and Palin pay lip service
to the movement, they are happy to glom on to its anti-tax, anti-Obama,
anti-government, anti-big-bank vitriol. But they don't call for any
actual action against the bailed-out perpetrators of the financial
crisis. They'd never ask for investments to put ordinary Americans back
to work. They have no policies to forestall foreclosures or protect
health insurance for the tea partiers who've been shafted by hard
times. Their only economic principle beside tax cuts is vilification of
the stimulus that did save countless jobs for firefighters, police
officers and teachers at the state and local level.
The Democrats' efforts to counter the deprivation and bitterness
spawned by the Great Recession are indeed timid and imperfect. The
right has a point when it says that the Senate health care votes of Ben
Nelson of Nebraska and Mary Landrieu of Louisiana were bought with
pork. But at least their constituents can share the pigout. Hustlers
like Steele and Palin take the money and run. All their followers get
in exchange is a lousy tea party T-shirt. Or a ghost-written
self-promotional book. Or a tepid racial sideshow far beneath the
incendiary standards of the party whose history from Strom to "macaca"
has driven away nearly every black American except Steele for the past
40 years.