The amorphous, fledgling Tea Party has an image problem.
When I think of the Tea Party, I picture a baby circus elephant abandoned on the Astroturf of some corporate-sponsored stadium, trumpeting for a peanut of recognition.
But that's probably not a fair or comprehensive depiction.
While Tea Parties fashion themselves as grassroots organizations, they are anything but.
In an Aug. 30 article in the New Yorker, Jane Mayer details how the Tea Party movement has been largely underwritten by the billionaire Koch brothers, David and Charles, through organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, which David Koch started in 2004, as a way to push their political agenda and libertarian policies.
The Kochs, Mayer notes, own Koch Industries, with an annual revenues estimated at $100 billion.
Mayer quotes conservative economist and historian Bruce Bartlett, who says the Kochs are "trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies."
While Tea Party activists often bemoan the influence of special interests and corporations on governmental policies, they are underwritten, both monetarily and ideologically, by what they bemoan, if one believes Mayer's depiction of the Kochs' influence on the Tea Party's direction.
I often hear Tea Partiers take aim at what they consider to be high taxes, deficit spending and the government's intrusion in business through regulatory policy, all of which they primarily blame on President Obama.
Of course, Obama has not raised income taxes, and much of his deficit spending has been to rein in out-of-control health care costs, stave off an economic depression, keep states afloat and support the unemployed.
According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a non-partisan organization that focuses on fiscal policy, projected future deficits are mostly driven by Bush-era tax cuts and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That narrative is largely missing in tea partiers' arguments.
Until tea parties distance themselves from corporate-funded policy organizations, honestly look at the genesis of deficits and actually propose an agenda that includes specific policies that deal with our long-term problems, I, for one, will not consider their movement either genuine or serious.
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