Crashing the tea party'

!By TIM RUTTEN
Los Angeles Times
Published: Tuesday, Apr. 20, 2010

One of the things journalism teaches you over and over again is that
nothing ruins a good story quite like the facts.

Consider, for example, last week's renewal of the chattering classes'
infatuation with the "tea party" movement, timed to coincide with
the deadline to file federal income tax returns. The group is
conventionally portrayed as a burgeoning populist expression of discontent
that sprouted spontaneously from the grass-roots and cuts in new ways
across sectional, class and gender lines.

Reams of analysis have proceeded from those assumptions, but like a great
deal that's based on anecdotal reporting, it turns out to be wrong. To
their great credit, the New York Times and CBS undertook extensive, and
expensive, polling that provides the first reliable look at the tea party
supporters. Little that has been generally assumed survived the scrutiny.

As it turns out, fewer than one in five Americans "supports" the
tea party movement in any respect, and just 4 percent of all adult
Americans have contributed to it or attended one of its events or both. (On
any given day, you probably could drum up twice as many people who think
the Pentagon is hiding dead aliens in Area 51.)

Of the 18 percent of all adults who expressed support for the tea party,
the overwhelming majority were white (89 percent), male (59 percent)
Republicans over age 45 (75 percent) and significantly more affluent and
better educated than the majority of Americans. One in five has an annual
income greater than $100,000, and 37 percent have advanced degrees. More
than nine out of 10 think President Obama is pushing the country into
"socialism."

The survey also found that more than half of the tea party supporters say
"the policies of the administration favor the poor, and 25 percent
think that the administration favors blacks over whites - compared with 11
percent of the general public."

If all this is beginning to have a familiar ring, it's because you've met
these guys before: They're the "angry white males" we've been
reading about since political strategist-turned-analyst Kevin Phillips
first identified them as an electoral presence during Richard Nixon's
successful presidential campaign in 1968.

They share many qualities with other Americans. For example, while 96
percent of tea party supporters say they disapprove of the current
Congress, 40 percent think their own representative does a good job, a
sentiment shared by 46 percent of all adults, 73 percent of whom disapprove
of the performance of Congress as a whole.

They aren't, however, implacable foes of "big government" or even
of taxes. More than half (52 percent) told the pollsters they think their
own "income taxes this year are fair," just 10 percent less than
all American adults. Moreover, a majority told follow-up interviewers that,
though they wanted "smaller government," they didn't want cuts in
our largest social programs, Social Security and Medicare.

So much for the surge of a new anti-government populism.

What the movement really amounts to is old wine in new skins, a re-branding
of the old-fashioned angry white male in a camera-ready package tailored to
the demands of the 24-hour cable news cycle.

Let's return to last week, for example: There's nothing harder for TV to
cover than a tax-filing deadline - no conflict, no action pictures. By
staging rallies on April 15, and particularly in Washington, the tea
party's strategists made themselves and their speakers the center of cable
news coverage. This was true despite the fact that, as the poll
demonstrates, a majority of the movement's supporters think their taxes are
fair.

As regular readers of this column will recall, the public packaging of the
tea party movement - and particularly events that win it TV airtime, like
cross-country bus tours, rallies and ads - is mainly the product of
California Republican political consultants, foremost among them the
Sacramento-based firm of Russo Marsh and Rogers. That company has not only
promoted the movement but also used it to raise money for a political
action committee, Our Country Deserves Better, founded to oppose Obama
during the general election. Last week, Politico reported that according to
federal filings, the Our Country PAC has raised $2.7 million since
launching the Tea Party Express bus tours.

"That fundraising success," Politico wrote, "has also meant
a brisk business for Russo Marsh." The website found that Russo Marsh
and a sister firm received $1.9 million of the $4.1 million in payments
made by the PAC; some of those funds would have gone for TV airtime and to
vendors.

It's good to see that all the creeping socialism in the nation hasn't
silenced traditional voices, like those of the angry white male, nor wrung
the profit motive from our politics.

ABOUT THE WRITER

Timothy Rutten is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Readers may send
him e-mail at timothy.rutten{at}latimes.com.

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