It’s painful being the token liberal on talk radio shows. The other night I was getting hammered by the host and my fellow panelists for arguing that “mainstream media” — whatever that is — do not go out of their way to make tea party protesters look like a bunch of right-wing kooks.
They scoffed when I claimed The New York Times, Washington Post and CNN were being evenhanded by reporting some protesters at a tea party rally were heard to shout racist comments at congressmen and carried signs depicting President Barack Obama as a big-lipped joker in whiteface.
But no sooner did they beat me down with assertions that theirs is a high-minded movement about limiting Big Government … than I was saved by the phones.
The show’s first caller, bless his angry soul, proceeded to rant that Obama is an impostor not legally qualified to be president. Where is his U.S. birth certificate? He won’t produce one, the caller vented, because he doesn’t have one, etc., etc.
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The other panelists looked at their shoes and the show’s screener quickly bid goodnight to Mr. Angry, but my point was inadvertently made: They’re out there — the so-called birthers, the gun nuts on guard against the Antichrist, the paramilitary wannabes playing ambush games in the Michigan woods.
And while the kooks and semikooks may not be representative of tea party conservatives, there is an immutable dynamic to American public opinion that tends to condemn the reasonable along with the unreasonable.
Most call this unfair dynamic “guilt by association.” I call it the “Villa Park A&P Factor.” Let me explain.
During the late ’60s, when I was in college at Northwestern University, I came home summers and on holiday breaks to stock shelves and trim lettuce at the Villa Park A&P on St. Charles Road. As my fellow boomers may recall, there was a revolution of sorts happening on college campuses, even the leafy one in Evanston, what with the anti-Vietnam war movement and the whole peace-love-dope shtick.
So irresistible was the fervor that even this NROTC midshipman hung a Che Guevara poster in his apartment and helped distribute anti-war leaflets to cars detouring around campus after some hard-liners barricaded Sheridan Road.
But during those breaks, while my more radicalized classmates snuck off to Cuba to help harvest sugar cane with the Vinceremos Brigade, I was getting a very different political education in the backroom of the A&P. There was no sympathy there — absolutely none — among the cashiers and bakery truck drivers for sign-waving protesters. In fact, they had nothing but contempt for flag-burners, draft-card destroyers and privileged college kids yelling “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, Viet Cong are gonna win!”
Lengthier stockroom conversations confirmed, moreover, that revolutionary theatrics were producing the exact opposite of their intended effect. In the growing anger of my co-workers I saw America’s political future — and his name was Richard Milhous Nixon.
This struck me as terribly unfair because, if you really talked to those cashiers and truck drivers, they too had grave misgivings about Vietnam. Many suspected it was a fool’s errand to support a corrupt, neo-colonial regime in Saigon; or to attack with B-52s a supply chain based on bicycles.
Those doubts were overwhelmed by the antics of the protesters.
So while I understand the tea party folks have some legitimate beefs with Obama and the Democrats, they had better start guarding their right flank as well as their left. Sure it’s great entertainment to listen, day after day, night after night, to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck rail against the un-Americanism of galloping socialism and government-run medicine.
But public opinion is a fickle thing. And just when you think you’ve got a majority on your side, some unhinged believer will fly his Cessna into an IRS office in Texas, or blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City, or get caught bugging the Capitol offices of a liberal U.S. senator, or plan to murder a cop so he can blow up more cops at the funeral.
It’s not fair to smear you with that brush, I know. But it’s still how public opinion works — even if there’s no more A&P in Villa Park.
John McCarron writes, teaches and consults on urban affairs.