Harvard Professor: Tea Party Not Going Anywhere, More Likely to Win

(via Breitbart) — A government and sociology professor at Harvard writes that the Tea Party is more likely than not to “win in the end” in an age when Americans are becoming more removed from Washington and distrusting the federal government and their elected officials.

“Tea Party forces will still win in the end,” Theda Skocpol writes, unless moderate Republicans can defeat them. Skocpol concedes that the Tea Party “will triumph just by hanging on long enough” as Americans are getting fed up by “our blatantly manipulated democracy and our permanently hobbled government.”

The article, “Why The Tea Party Isn’t Going Anywhere,” was first published in the journal Democracy, and later reprinted in The Atlantic.

Despite the fact that Democrats, the mainstream media, and the Republican establishment again were predicting the “demise of the Tea Party” immediately after the government shutdown ended, Skocpol doesn’t believe so.

“But we have heard all this before,” she writes. “The Tea Party’s hold on the GOP persists beyond each burial ceremony.”

Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson published a book in 2011 that “showed how bottom-up and top-down forces intersect to give the Tea Party both leverage over the Republican Party and the clout to push national politics sharply to the right.”

“At the grassroots, volunteer activists formed hundreds of local Tea Parties, meeting regularly to plot public protests against the Obama Administration and place steady pressure on GOP organizations and candidates at all levels,” they found. “At least half of all GOP voters sympathize with this Tea Party upsurge.”

Though Skokpol and Williamson have their typical biases and describe the Tea Party movement as a “radical” one that may not like minorities–without any evidence of that assertion–they acknowledge that “even though there is no one center of Tea Party authority—indeed, in some ways because there is no one organized center—the entire gaggle of grassroots” and outside groups that support the movement “wields money and primary votes to exert powerful pressure on Republican officeholders and candidates.”

Skocpol observes that the “Tea Party clout has grown in Washington and state capitals” because “Americans are also losing ever more faith in the federal government.” In addition, “most legislators and candidates are Nervous Nellies,” and they have seen the Tea Party defeat establishment Republicans like Charlie Crist in Florida in 2010 and David Dewhurst in Texas in 2012 in addition to knocking off incumbent Republican Sens. Bob Bennett (R-UT) and Richard Lugar (R-IN).

“That grabs legislators’ attention and results in either enthusiastic support for, or acquiescence to, obstructive tactics,” Skocpol writes.

She writes how powerfully someone like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) resonates with the Tea Party. She noted that he was able to direct House Republicans to pressure House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to demand that President Barack Obama and Democrats fund the government except for Obamacare.

Skocpol notes that it will not be easy to defeat the Tea Party.

“For one, at least three successive national election defeats will be necessary to even begin to break the determination and leverage of Tea Party adherents,” Skocpol writes. She concedes that Tea Partiers will not “stand down easily or very soon.”

Skocpol notes “moderate Republicans” do not have as much power in Washington or in state capitals and points to Cruz as being “very well positioned to garner unified Tea Party support in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries.” The Chamber of Commerce will reportedly spend $50 million to wage war against the Tea Party, along with Karl Rove’s American Crossroads; Skocpol believes unless those groups defeat the Tea Party, it may well win many permanent victories.

“During the last election cycle, no far-right candidate ever consolidated sustained grassroots Tea Party support, as those voters hopped from Rick Perry to Herman Cain to Newt Gingrich to Rick Santorum,” Skocpol writes. “But this time, Cruz may very well enjoy unified and enthusiastic grassroots Tea Party support from the beginning of the primary election season.”

Skocpol also sends a warning to Democrats who think that the Tea Party will fade because of a few bad polls.

“Once the October 2013 shutdown ended in supposed total victory for President Obama and his party, many Democrats adopted a cocky swagger and started talking about ousting the House GOP in 2014,” Skocpol writes. However, she warns that “a clear-eyed look shows that Tea Party remains powerful and has achieved victories that continue to stymie” Democrats and their statist agenda.

[H/T Breitbart]

Was Andrew Breitbart Murdered Over This Explosive CPAC Speech, ‘What do we get now in Barack Obama, well I’ve got videos by the way, this election we’re going to vet him’

Did his explosive CPAC speech get him killed? And why has the MSM come out so quickly claiming natural causes? As free thinking Americans we must demand answers to these questions as well as an autopsy be done on the body of this American Patriot, Andrew Breitbart.

Was this the video (most likely heavily edited) that killed Andrew Breitbart?:

Harvard: Students Turn on Obama, Want Him Recalled, Reject Obamacare

The Obama thrill is gone among America’s millennials aged 18-29 just a year after they helped the president win a second term.

A new and shocking poll from Harvard University’s Institute of Politicsreleased Wednesday found that younger Americans are so disgusted with President Obama, Congress and the troubled Obamacare system that 47 percent support recalling the president and just 29 percent are planning to sign up for health insurance.

“A critical factor in the election and reelection of Barack Obama, America’s 18- to 29- year-olds now rate the president’s job performance closer to that ofCongress — and at the lowest level since he took office in 2009,” said Harvard Institute of Politics Director Trey Grayson.

How bad is it? Obama’s approval rating among millennials, many with big college loans and no job, is just 41 percent. Even young blacks are tiring of the president, with his approval rating among African-Americans dropping from 84 percent seven months ago to 75 percent today.

Harvard’s poll is especially troubling for Obamacare, which needs millions of younger Americans involved for it to succeed financially. The poll found that 57 disapprove of Obamacare and that there is little interest in signing up.

Worse, by a margin of more than two-to-one, 44 percent of millennials believe that the quality of their care will get worse under the Affordable Care Act and 50 percent believe their cost of care will increase.

“Young Americans aren’t daft, they know a bad deal when they see one and that is why they are abandoning the president and no amount of spin can change the facts that just like MySpace, Millennials are over Obama,” said Raffi Williams, deputy press secretary at the Republican National Committee.

On the issue of recalling the president and Congress, 52 would recall all members of Congress and 47 percent would junk the president, though a nearly-equal 46 percent would not recall him.

[H/T Washington Times]

Harvard Law Review: Obama was ‘Born in Kenya and Raised in Indonesia and Hawaii’

A page from a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel discovered by Breitbart.com re-surfaced in 2012 stating that he was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

Snopes explained away the discovery as a “mistake” claimed by the author of the pamphlet. However that doesn’t change the words printed in it. Even if the woman who authored it apologized for making a editorial mistake. The question still stands, where then did she get the idea to even write that he was “born in Kenya?” And further, how could a “Literary Agency” in charge of publishing and promoting books, make such a drastic “mistake?” Wouldn’t they have fact-checked their own work before publishing a promotional pamphlet?

Top 5 Michelle Obama Bitches: Okay, That’s a Little Harsh, Top 5 Complaints By Our First Lady

Choosing the Top 5 Michelle Obama ‘Bitches’ was tough… it’s like choosing only 5 scandals of her husband’s!  So many to choose from, why stop at 5?  As published by Breitbart:

5. The White House is like a “really nice prison.” Which would mean that the First Lady failed to make parole in November 2012. Ms. Obama made that complaint at the African First Ladies Summit in Tanzania, among fellow inmates, some from countries where the opposition occupies really nasty prisons.

4. Our student loans were “higher than our mortgage.” That complaint, at the 2012 Democratic National Convention, sounds awful, except that both of the Obamas went to Harvard Law School, one of the most elite and expensive schools in the country. Many young people today would love to have a mortgage.

3. I “feel like a visitor” at Princeton. Ms. Obama wrote her undergraduate thesis about the conundrum of black identity on an Ivy League campus, despite the “liberal and open-minded” attitude of some students and professors. An interesting topic, but not what most people would regard as a serious grievance.

2. Law clients like Barney and Coors not interesting enough. As a second-year associate at the prestigious Sidley Austin law firm, Ms. Obama asked for more interesting work–and received it, but working on major cases involving public television simply was not good enough to suit her ambitions.

And the winner… drum roll…

1. America is “just downright mean.” Ms. Obama lodged that complaint on the campaign trail in 2008, explaining why America needed the kind of radical change that only her husband could bring. The country had “become a nation of struggling folks who are barely making it every day,” needing urgent redistribution.