The tea party vs. common sense

By Clarence Page

Ah, Scotty, the tea party hardly knew ya.

After he won the late Ted Kennedy’s seat earlier this year and broke the Democrats’ lock on the Senate, Scott Brown was hailed as a hero by backers in the anti-tax tea party movement. But that was then.

More recently the tea partiers have been roiling with rage against the Massachusetts Republican by way of blog posts, editorials and messages to Brown’s Facebook page.

“His career as a senator of the people lasted slightly longer than the shelf life of milk,” Shelby Blakely, executive director of the New Patriot Journal and an Internet radio show affiliated with the Tea Party Patriots, told The Boston Globe. “The general mood of the tea party is, ‘We put you in, and we’ll take you out in 2012.’”

How quickly the bloom falls off the rose. What did Brown do that was so wrong? He voted for bills backed by President Barack Obama to stimulate jobs and overhaul financial regulation. For conservative hard-liners, voting for anything backed by Obama would be enough.

Brown says he’s exactly what he promised he would be, an independent-thinking conservative. But, like other hard-liner movements, tea partiers want independent thinkers who do not think too independently.

The backlash against Brown says a lot about how seriously the tea party wants to deal with real problems or, as Rush Limbaugh famously said, simply wants Obama to fail.

As a result, Brown is being punished for doing the right thing, trying to serve his constituents in ways that can help him get re-elected without hurting the rest of the country.

He won his Senate seat in an unusual surge against incumbents in a special election at the height of the health care debate. But after the dust settled, Brown still is a Republican senator from a state so liberal conservatives call it “Tax-a-chusetts.”

And he votes like a Republican. In fact, The Boston Globe reported recently that Brown voted 84 percent of the time with Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, which was about the same as his record as a state legislator.

But when issues like jobs and the financial reform bill came up, he refused to simply vote “no” as a partisan reflex. He sided with Democrats on the jobs bill, much to the consternation of conservatives. He opposed the financial reform, at first, as too costly and even joined an unsuccessful Republican filibuster to stop Democrats from starting debate on it.

But he also submitted amendments to improve it. In the end, he voted in favor of it only after changes came with the help of Democrats including Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. John Kerry. Both come from his home state but neither has a name that will bring cheers at a tea party rally.

To his credit, Brown asked for changes to legislation that would help his state without being specific only to his state. In that way he avoided the sort of targeted favors that brought ridicule and outrage to some Democratic senators during the health care debate. Still, he opened himself up to the charge that he was “just another Washington politician” cutting deals, but a closer examination shows his deals won’t do much to upset his constituents.

As a result, the Brown backlash offers a test of how important partisan ideology really is when it comes up against something we commonly call “common sense,” although the meaning of that term too often has been distorted by various partisans.

Common sense tells us, for example, that New England needs jobs like the rest of the country does and that Wall Street needs to be regulated like any other major casino.

Common sense also says that New Englanders don’t vote like, say, Georgia. That makes the Brown backlash an important test case for national Republicans. After Obama’s victory, GOP leaders like McConnell openly complained that the GOP was becoming a regional party, isolated mostly in the South. Brown helped bring about new hope. Now Republicans want to benefit from tea-party energy without being dragged back into isolation as a regional “Party of No,” or as Sarah Palin puts it, “the Party of Hell No!”

About a third of the national electorate describes itself as independent, too independent or fed-up to declare allegiance to either party. Most voters, I would argue, care less about who’s right or left than about what works. That’s common sense. At least, it should be.