The Tea Party In Perspective

EJ Dionne has his head in the sand.  Or maybe somewhere else.  Today he says the Tea Party is a scam. Just recently, tea party victories in Alaska and Delaware Senate primaries shook the nation. In Delaware, Christine O'Donnell received 30,563 votes in the Republican primary, 3,542 votes more than moderate Rep. Mike Castle. In Alaska, Joe Miller won 55,878 votes for a margin of 2,006 over incumbent Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who is now running as a write-in candidate. Do the math. For weeks now, our national political conversation has been driven by 86,441 voters and a margin of 5,548 votes. A bit of perspective: When John McCain lost in 2008, he received 59.9 million votes. Actually, the conversation started more than a few weeks ago.  Here's a little reminder:

There was this little gathering in Washington, DC last year on September 12th. The momentum hasn't slowed, and Dionne must know it in his heart.  He goes on to echo the Main Stream Media Lament. But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is "The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History," observed in an interview that there is a "hall of mirrors" effect created by the rise of "niche" opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives. Dionne is distraught over the rise of what he calls "niche" opinion media and how it has crippled mainstream media's power to ignore stories that don't fit the progressive narrative. And of course, if it doesn't fit it must be a scam.