Chris Graham: Party in the middle

The Tea Party doesn’t like big government. The Occupy movement doesn’t like big business. We’re letting the fringes drive the agenda.

Guess who wins?

– The media entities that make billions in ad dollars from drawing eyes to the theater of the absurd that is prime-time cable news. Which is to say, nobody’s watching CSPAN or PBS breaking down issues when they can have Hannity and O’Reilly and Olbermann and Maddow and the rest breaking bones right there on live TV.

– The anarchists. And they’re on both sides. We know that they’re running the Occupy movement. The Tea Partiers don’t refer to or think of themselves that way, but if your aim is to cripple government, yeah, well, you are what you are.

– The pols. Don’t kid yourselves, TP’ers and Occupiers. You can rouse all the rabble you want. The entrenched allow you to do what you do because the circus sideshows that you put on delegitimize the myriad valid critiques of the status quo.

Guess who loses?

– Well, yeah, duh, the 60 percent of us in the middle who think that the Tea Party and Occupiers are full of it. We’d stay up all hours of the night blogging about Obama being born in Kenya and hanging out in parks flashing gang signs at each other, except that we have to get up in the morning to go to work, to run our small businesses, to get the kids to school and to soccer practice, to get dinner on the table, to keep the roof over our heads at night.

– The economy. Sorry, Tea Party, but we’ve got 75 years of evidence of how government spending is a necessary evil to turn around a down economy. Now is not the time to turn back the clock to the Herbert Hoover era to see if we can get that to work again. And sorry, Occupy, but the act of starting and running a successful business is not inherently a bad thing. But you guys knew that already – somebody among your collective had to have even just a sliver of business acumen to figure out how to raise and disburse money to keep the tents up and hot soup a-comin’.

I hate to admit to being at a loss as to what those of us who actually like America and instead of tearing down what we have to start over would prefer that we work to build upon what we have can do to get our point across, but I am.

Suggestions?

Column by Chris Graham