Tea Party

Romney Secures His Tea Party Flank

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The Romney for President campaign announced today the selection of Wisconsin House Representative Paul Ryan as Mitt Romney’s Vice Presidential running mate. Glenn Reynolds has the round up here. This move cements the emerging “Tea Party Wing” of the Republican party to his candidacy after a series of miscues that John Podhoretz and Byron York catalog here and here.

Short of nominating Sarah Palin, this move is the strongest signal Romney can give to the Tea Party that they have reliable and powerful standard bearer inside a Romney Administration executive branch for their issues. One who will be in all the rooms where decisions are made.

People are policy.

Romney’s choice of Rep. Ryan just gave the Tea Party their strongest possible policy advocate for their platform of fiscal reform by reduced federal spending.

For the Obama Administration, this is both a nightmare and an opportunity. The nightmare is that nothing they do to reduce white working class Republican turn out is going to work. Ryan represents a promise to them and hope for the future. In so many words, Romney’s choice of Ryan gives those voters something to vote FOR.

The opportunity for Obama is using Romney’s choice of Ryan as a tool to increase Democratic Party base turn out.

That looks like a faint hope for Democrats to me, but I have been wrong before.

In the Post

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I’ve been thinking for a while based on my own use of the service that the good old US Post Office is something well past its best-if-used-by date. Oh, no not that it should be done away with as a government service entirely. But I can contemplate delivery of the mail only two or three times a week with perfect equanimity … which is at least a little tragic for there were times when the daily arrival of the mail was a much-looked-forward-to thing. When I was overseas, or in a remote location like Greenland (and in military outposts today I am certain) the arrival of the mail (three times a week) was anticipated with keen interest, since it was our lifeline to the outside world. There were letters from family, loved ones, magazines, catalogues and packages with goodies in them sometimes gifts, sometimes items ordered … the whole world, crammed into a tiny box with a locking door in the central post office; the magical envelopes, the catalogues and magazines in a tight-packed roll, the little pink slips that meant a package … and then, between one or two decades, it all changed.

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Musings on L’Affaire du Poulet Filet

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Taking it into my head to go to the local Chick-fil-A last Wednesday was another one of those odd things, like getting involved in the Tea party which happened because of a friend. In this case, a purely on-line friend; the friend who inveigled me into attending an early San Antonio Tea Party planning committee meeting was a blog-friend whom I had actually met on a couple of social occasions, so when he said, ‘Hey, we need someone to write press releases and stuff, and you’re a writer and you were a broadcaster, so can ya?’ And being a stubborn independent libertarian-conservative sort, it seemed like a good idea. That the planned event very shortly turned into an all-Texas blow-out with 15,000 to maybe as many as 20,000 in attendance … well, I didn’t have anything much to do with that … I just kept my head down and sent out the press releases and made myself available for local media interviews.

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Update – Chick-fil-A

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The daughter unit was working today, so we waited and had late-lunch, early dinner. The local Chick-fil-A nearest us was jammed, even more than it was last Saturday, and the line of cars for the drive-through window went around the building, through the parking lot of the business next to it, out to the access road through the shopping center, down the access road to the highway access road. The cashier told us that at lunch today, the line went all the way to the Costco, about a third of a mile away.

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Natty Bumppo Would Understand

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Natty Bumppo

Tea Partiers want to be left alone government kept from faith and speech, guns and books. Government restrained from taking property house or wallet. Anyone who thinks those beliefs don’t have legs isn’t getting my phone calls the tea party candidate’s supporters in the primary fill the answering machine and from my husband’s relatives fill our in-box. It has legs because this is who we are, or at least want to be: responsible adults, autonomous. Equivalence with the Occupiers misses core differences; Occupiers want what they fantasize the 1% have. We are human we covet. But Americans haven’t taken to OWS because we aren’t proud of our envy; we prefer grandeur to pettiness.

The Tea Party has roots – aware that restraint of power is difficult, but has a proud American history. Washington’s greatness lay not only in his victories but also his restraint he refused (as few have) to abuse his power restraint gained him respect, gave him another kind of power. Respect for flag and country characterizes the tea party; it is respect for a greatness defined by its restraint recognizing the limits of government when it bumps against man’s intrinsic rights.

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