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When you were getting ready for the snow, I went to a Tea Party
The Web site for the award-winning alternative weekly, the Philadelphia City Paper.
When you were getting ready for the snow, I went to a Tea Party
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| Photo | Alice in Wonderland |
On Tuesday night, while the rest of you were stocking up on bread and six-packs, or poring over Lostpedia, I decided to brave the beginning of Snowpocalypse III and attend the Tea Party Candidates Forum in Center City. After all, there were 14 Congressional candidates, three Lieutenant Governor candidates, two Senate candidates and two Governor candidates (including Tom Corbett) set to speak.
You won't be surprised to hear that 90 percent of the candidates made references to the fact that global warming is a hoax because, clearly, look outside! It's snowing! (After saying such things, James Jones, who's running in the 8th Congressional district, actually talked about an Ice Age that allegedly took place in the '70s … I think he was referring to this.) Or that almost everyone I talked to in the audience seemed to be from Lansdale, Blue Bell, Ardmore or anywhere other than Philly proper — save for a few who came from the Northeast. Or that almost everyone was white … and bald … and old. Or that one of the moderators' questions was, "When's the last time you read the Constitution?" to which nearly every candidate said, "Er, last night!" (Ira Hoffman, also running in the 8th Congressional district, admitted that he reads the U.S. Constitution for Dummies instead.) Or that Hoffman made an off-color joke about Democratic Rep. John Murtha, who died this Monday. ("Half the earmarks have been snuffed within the last 48 hours," he said.)
No, none of that is surprising, given media coverage like last week's Philadelphia Weekly cover story.
What I did find interesting, and surprising, was the fact that many of these candidates and audience members contained multitudes that you never see represented in the press. For one, the Tea Party population is viewed as being 100 percent white — and James Jones is black, and there was a (small) number of black people in the audience. (Perhaps that's why the TPs were on good behavior on Tuesday — nary a racist statement was made, neither in printed literature nor speech … which is quite different than what PW's Jonathan Valania found at a Media Tea Party event.) Also, several of the candidates made some fairly anti-war statements: Pia Varma, running in the 1st Congressional district, said "we can't fight a War on Terror forever" and "it's now time to sit down and think about what we're doing over there." (Varma also said "immigrants are the backbone of our country" — at a Tea Party! A Tea Party!) Similarly, Patrick Sellers, running in the 6th Congressional district, said of the men and women who are fighting our country's two wars, "It's time to bring them home." Meanwhile, on the not-totally-crazy-about-the-environment front, Steve Welch, also running in the 6th district, said, "It's our responsibility to pass on a country with clean air to our children." Sellers also stated that eliminating earmarks — perhaps the most vilified entity in the TP coalition — is like "trimming the nosehairs" of the budget deficit.
It's hard to say whether or not these candidates, many of them new to politics, will hold onto these beliefs once the GOP machine gets ahold of them. But, still, it's worth noting that Tea Party folk are not 100 percent crazy, 100 percent of the time. A great article in the New Yorker recently explored such things.
Holly, Nowhere in the PW cover story I wrote about the Tea Party movement did I state that anybody made blatantly racist remarks at the meeting of the Delco Partriots I attended. In fact, I explicitly said nobody made blatantly racist remarks in the second to the last paragraph of the story. I would ask that you correct your piece to reflect as much. thanks in advance, Jonathan Valania Phawker.com
Hey Jonathan, I never stated that you said Tea Partiers made "blatantly racist remarks." (In fact, the instances of racism you found were indeed not blatant.) I just wrote that absolutely no racist statement — blatant or not — was made at the CC event I attended, as far as I could tell, and that seemed to be quite different than what you found. In your piece, you write: "Another piece of literature railed against health care reform. 'It is morally wrong to reduce Medicare (400 billion dollars) to those who have earned it to give in [SIC] new ‘HEALTH CARE BENEFITS' to people who have not earned them.' 'People who have not earned them' being, perhaps, a nice way of saying low-income, non-white people." You say a similar thing about another piece of literature in the paragraph right below that one. Am I misunderstanding something? If anything, I can clarify that I found nothing in speech or print that was racist (since what you found was in a piece of literature). So, I can change my sentence from "nary a racist statement was made … which is quite different than what PW's Jonathan Valania found at a Media Tea Party event" to "nary a racist statement was made, neither in printed literature nor speech … which is quite different than what PW's Jonathan Valania found at a Media Tea Party event." I believe that covers it. Feel free to comment if you disagree.
It seems like the racism in Valania's piece is inferred by the author himself (from an ambiguous pamphlet, no less), and couched in uncertainty ("perhaps").
I think that both his inference and CP's interpretation are probably unfair.
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