Shock! Tea Party A Republican Retread!

I'm shocked! Shocked! I tell you, to discover that, contrary to gullible mainstream media reportage, the "Tea Party Movement" is not only not new, it's just the same right wing Republicans freaking out because the other guys took Congress and the White House in 2006 and 2008.

Steve Kornacki tells the story:

The main difference between then and now, I've been saying, is that the GOP base's backlash didn't have a catchy name when Clinton was president. But today, it does: The Tea Party.

And now there's even more proof that the terms "Tea Party movement" and "Republican Party base" are interchangeable. A new poll conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal finds that 27 percent of voters describe themselves as Tea Party supporters. And what do we know about the people that make up that 27 percent? Here's how NBC's First Read put it:

These folks, it turns out, are more conservative and bigger watchers of FOX News than your typical Republican. Per [Bill] McInturff, Tea Party members are simply re-branded conservative GOP primary voters -- not something completely new. “These are conservative Republicans who watch FOX, and who are very ticked off,” he said.

Bill McInturff, by the way, is a longtime Republican pollster. Nor is this the first time the demographic similarities between the Tea Party movement and the GOP base have been documented; we've written about it here before.

But it's impossible to emphasize this crossover enough, given how willing the media has been to treat the Tea Party movement as some unique, non-partisan uprising of the middle class against Obama's governing vision. In reality, it's just the modern (i.e. post-Rockefeller/Eastern Establishment era) Republican base doing what it always does when Democrats run the show in Washington.

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