I got out of meetings on Capitol Hill at 4:30 and, not wanting to go home, I picked the DuPont Circle stop on the red line to Shady Grove, this being an area I'm familiar with - Salsa Labs is right around the corner.
There are a lot of places to eat, but I tend to find places that can serve me without trying to slip a little gluten into the mix. Afterwords, a cafe connected to Kramer Books, fits the bill nicely.
The Congressmen are still down on the Hill, grinding away on their bill, while I'm sitting here, puzzling over how to interpret the events of the week.
Every time I'm here I come back and tell you guys that we've arrived. That's the small 'we', Beth, I, and some others who are part of the advanced party of Progressive activists who are setting up shop on Capitol Hill. But we'd have no more traction than a pair of street mumblers who happen to be clean enough to get past security if we didn't have all of you at our backs. There is a larger WE, which you are part of if you're reading and commenting, so don't be shy about keeping us up on happenings around the country and what problems need solving.
The Tea Party arrived here last fall, and unlike the helpful, thoughtful Progressives I meet what I see of them is that they are on the backs of their Congressmen. No matter how the debt ceiling debacle turns out John Boehner is done as Speaker of the House. Eric Cantor will make his move in the next week to ten days, barring some extraordinary national emergency.
And it isn't just Boehner - I believe I've seen credible threats that the Tea Party will primary Allen West. Any Republican who doesn't immediately deliver on their most fevered, extremist vision will be removed by the Tea Party in a primary challenge. Any Congressman who does what the Tea Party so fervently wishes will be lucky if all their district does is kick them out of office in 2012.
We are so dramatically different than this artificial fringe group that there is a lot of unintentional comedy. When I was at netroots nation I went to the Left Meets Right event and spoke with one of my counterparts on the other side of the aisle. "How do I get Progressives to attack me personally? That's how I can get more traffic." I shrugged it off - I do elections because I want good policy.
I met a state level Tea Party organizer the other day, riding on our socialist Metro system no less. I quizzed her a bit about where she was from and her views, then I admitted to being a Kossack. Again the same sentiment - "Someone there wrote about us once, we got a lot of traffic ..." The question, was I going to attack their specific group, seemed to me to be hanging in the air.
That's an important bit of intel, this desire for combative interactions. If we choose our battles a little more carefully the Tea Party's pernicious effect on our government will fly to bit in short order. Here's how we'll do it:
No more broad indictments of the Tea Party members. My view is that the bulk of them are right to be angry about the condition our country is in, but they've been sold a bill of goods by our rotten media as to the reason we have the troubles we do. Someone needs to assemble a structured communication program to reach and educate their masses.
Specific bad actors need to be singled out and eliminated. I'm talking about the Breitbarts, the O'Keefes, the J.T. Ready types - if they're unethical and doing damage let them be sued into oblivion, if they're criminal, like O'Keefe, then we set a fire underneath the Attorneys General in the states where attention is needed and we make it white hot until we get the housecleaning we need.
The media has a role in this circus. We need to spank and I mean hard. It took a year to get rid of Glenn Beck. The next hate talker to go needs to be done in a quarter of that time. You don't know how this came to be? A handful of people ran off 300+ advertisers and the rationale News Corp had for keeping him became untenable. We might just see Fox News's parent melt down completely in the coming months. We need to get on top of their competitors now and make it clear that they are not going to pick up where Fox left off without paying a terrible price.
This is not at all what I intended to report on when I sat down, it's just what came out. I've got some photos of what it's like to be on Capitol Hill taking care of business, rather than just being a constituent or a tourist. I'm on my little netbook using the built in 3G network and I fear I'll overrun my monthly limit if I try to load images, so you'll have to wait for the next installment to get a glimpse inside the machinery of policy making.