All local politics is national?*

Caption from our very first Tea Party March 28, 2009: "Feisty Anna is pretty outraged, and we've been following the growing tea party movement through blogs and Pajamas Media," reports Anna's mother, blogfriend Amy Kane of Atlantic Ave. Above, Anna and friends display the artful signage of Anna's younger sister at yesterday's Essex County Tea Party and Rally in front of Newburyport City Hall on Boston's north shore.

"As a teenager steeped in New York politics in the 1970s I remember the names Lindsay, Javits and Rockefeller as iconic — all moderate, pro-choice Republicans," writes PBS "To the Contrary" host Bonnie Erbé:

But that was before the Pat Robertsons, Jerry Falwells, James Dobsons and later the Karl Roves of the world discovered that wedge issues [abortion, gay marriage and immigration reform] drew conservative Christians and others to the polls ... particularly in the South and Midwest.

Tsk, tsk. Did our own Karl Rove do that? Wedge issues seem so yesterday in the clarifying light of The Brown Revolution. But it didn't start with Brown. As Army of Davids foot soldier Norsu twittered the other day:

"Does Doug Hoffman's run in NY23 signal the start of a Revolution? Looking back - YES!!!!!"

"It was a eureka moment as we saw the social-networking sausage taking shape before our eyes," we wrote back then:

Delicious! It started with Sarah Palin's endorsement last week of Doug Hoffman, the independent conservative candidate challenging ACORN-supporting Republican-Party-sanctioned RINO Dede Scozzafava in the upstate NY District 23 congressional special election. Dismissed by Newt Gingrich and the Republican Party establishment, Hoffman has become a beacon of hope for the Army of Davids Tea Partiers, who are getting glimpses of a way out of the desert.

Hoffman lost in a close race when Scozzafava — dubbed by Mark Steyn a “DIABLO” (Democrat In All But Label Only) for her liberal views — dropped out of the race and threw her support behind Democrat Bill Owen, but Hoffman was perhaps the first local candidate whose race became a cause célèbre for Tea Partiers nationwide, and the rest is history.

Update: "Still, all things considered, I suspect Tip O'Neil's axiom will still ring true," writes Dan with a link. (Thanks!) "I guess it depends upon what your meaning of local is," we reply:

Is local a place on the ground or a place in the mind?

Update II: Jeff S in the comment nails it:

All politics is still local — but now local is as big as the internet.

Yup. A place in the mind.

*Blog title is a play on Tip O'Neill's classic "All politics is local." But that was then. With the new social-networking tools, the local has gone viral as old-boy networks are being "disintermediated via the internet."

Comments

[goomp]

Let us hope and strive to make today's Tea Party's as successful as the origional Boston Tea Party.

[Amy]

I hesitate to use the word that starts with a CH and ends with a GE but... so much has happened since March in Newburyport!

[Jeff S.]

All politics is still local--but now local is as big as the internet.

[Gayle Miller]

And increasingly, the electorate is intent on dealing with REAL issues rather than ephemeral, "manufactured" issues. We don't buy into the climate change nonsense quite so readily as was expected, we don't hang our heads and feel inferior to those who attended the "elite" schools and, like Sarah Palin, have no shame at having attended a good state university where there is no place for arrogant snobbery. We understand much more clearly than the "elite" media would like that overspending leads to long-term debt and burdens our children far into the future. In other words, we are one heck of a lot smarter than the big-deal politicians want us to be. So sorry guys, but you need to get your noses out of the air and your heads out of your nether orifices and realize that you aren't the boss of the average American, you are our equal at best and perhaps, in displaying so blatantly your disdain for us, you earn our contempt rather than our servile adoration! Because we get it. We really truly get it!

[MCNS]

I admire the old Rockefeller Republicans as much as the next fellow, but I confess to growing impatient when Bonnie Erbe et al wax nostalgic over the "moderate pro-choice" Republicans of old. As Mary Meehan observes, pro-life Democrats once made up an influential segment of their party:

In the 1970s, there was major opposition to abortion within the Democratic party--even after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. In 1977, for example, the right-to-life movement could count on 10-20 Democratic votes in the Senate and over 100 in the House.12 Pro-life Democratic senators included both moderates, and prominent liberals such as Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, Jennings Randolph of West Virginia, and William Proxmire of Wisconsin. Thea Rossi Barron, a Democrats for Life board member who was the National Right to Life Committee's first lobbyist, especially remembers "that wonderful senator, Tom Eagleton, who was always pro-life" and who was "the real leader, the floor leader" for the cause in the Senate. In the House, she could rely on Democrats James Oberstar of Minnesota and Romano Mazzoli of Kentucky as floor leaders; Democrat Daniel Flood of Pennsylvania, who championed pro-life riders on appropriations bills; and many others. All of this added up to real strength in a Congress then controlled by the Democrats.

Perhaps the GOP isn't the only party that today has been captured by its "extremist" wing? Is it possible that many members of the Party of the People once actually saw it as important to stand for society's weakest and most vulnerable -- unborn children?

To the Bonnie Erbes, however, to be "moderate" is to be "pro-choice." Before she starts going on about wedges perhaps she ought to remove the one in her own eye.