Coffee, Tea or ME, ME, ME!

This week we feature a guest blog from anthropologist and museum curator Patrick Dowdey. Reader contributions and comments are always welcome.

The primaries are over now, and we’ve gotten to have a really good look at the ‘tea-party’ movement and its candidates. A really good look: they have the media’s fickle attention in a hammerlock; you hear more about them that even celebrity canoodlings. And I think that’s my first conclusion about the TPers: many of them seem to have Attention Deficit Disorder. Not in the  sense that they can’t concentrate: they concentrate really well. Rather in the other meaning of the words, that they can’t ever ever get enough attention.

The “Mama Grizzly” of the TP is of course Sarah Palin, and she’s a really good example of the breed. Loves the lens, loves the cheering crowd, but terminally bored with all the gruesome old work of governance. Loud and weird is the mantra, and anything to get a rise out of people, make them look at me. And if Sarah Palin is the Mama Grizzly, Newt Gingrich is now grown into the Old Grandad. Newt is still good for a meaty quote; but for all his years in the Congress, what can he point to in the way of legislation or anything done for the American people? How much of the Contract with America did he fulfill? What have any of these people done for their constituents? We’ve forgotten how to ask these questions as we spin from rally to rally, from accusation to attention-grabbing accusation.

That’s one kind of Boston Harbor party-goer. The other kind is the monied kind, the Meg Whitmans and Linda McMahons of the new political universe. They too make a lot of noise, this time bought and paid for with their private fortunes, Whitman’s (Cali Gov) from eBay and McMahon’s (Connecticut Senate) from World Wrestling Entertainment. They don’t seem so much desperate for attention as desperate to run things, big things -- like a government so out of control as to extend health benefits to all citizens and provide unemployment in the deepest recession since WWII.

Both sets of Teepees run with the advantage of being pretty new to the major political scene, people mostly untarnished by the Bush debacle (and the Abramowitz, Craig, De Lay and Trent Lott side-debacles...BP tea anyone?) and thus able to campaign exactly the way W did without mentioning the name of America’s worst president ever. All hold out hope to people with little detail on how that hope will be realized and little to point to in the way of political accomplishment beyond campaigning successes. W was like that, good at the electronic moment, preternaturally bad at actual governance. They lead, but where?

It’s all pretty weak tea to me. Like Harry Reid, I’m a strong coffee voter, and I will gladly buy you a cup. Let’s turn off the noise and talk awhile.

Photo: Meg Whitman, credit: flickr, matthewfilipowicz