Conservative Opposition to Teabag Central

(Admittedly, the cartoon doesn't relate solely to this post.) Somewhat to my surprise, a faction inside the GOP are voicing their rejection of the anti-Obama and anti-government fervor. Peter Wallsten in the LAT reports that a smattering of Republicans view the fringe elements as irresponsible. Then again, there are those who draw the wrong conclusions, such as one of McCain's former spokesman during the campaign, Michael Goldfarb. Drawing parallels to 2006 and 2008, Goldfarb asks "'do we look crackpot? Yes' and he misses the point by alleging "but that's how the left looked to me in 2004, and in 2006 they took back Congress. Then they started marginalizing the lunatics." The leftest wing of the Democratic party didn't mobilize the voting populous. It was Bush's failed foreign policy and his economic policies. A story in the Atlantic plumbs the census records from the Bush administration and finds:

"While Bush was in office, the median household income declined, poverty increased, childhood poverty increased even more, and the number of Americans without health insurance spiked. By contrast, the country's condition improved on each of those measures during Bill Clinton's two terms, often substantially."

Goldfarb is walking away with the wrong lesson and seems oblivious to the nature of the teabag protests. That's not to say that some of the issues raised aren't troubling to Democratic hopefuls in 2010, but waves of people aren't going to switch their voting habits due to fears of czars, racist claims, Nazi detention camps, a wildly hysterical birth certificate pursuit, and other crazy ideas promulgated in the bowels of Glenn Beck's ratings-driven crusade. As the Daily Beast's John Avalon discovered this weekend after inquiring why a woman carried a Confederate flag:

"I asked her why she was carrying the Stars and Bars to the rally. 'Because I’m from the South…It has nothing to do with slavery. People think it means slavery. That’s not what it stood for. It stood for the Union.' Somewhere, Lincoln just threw up."

If that isn't scary and something to walk away from, I don't know what is. McCain showed some responsibility last year by denying a woman's claim that Obama was an Arab, which drew boos from an audience along a campaign stop. It's time for the GOP to do the same thing. It's doubtful that it will occur as they tend to view this through Goldfarb's prism of short-term political gain rather than a cancerous lesion.