The Tea Party could make a big impact in Congress, unless rival political factions successfully paint the largely independent-minded voter movement as being driven by racism in the controversy surrounding illegal immigration.
Over the weekend, 47 years to the day that Martin Luther King Jr. shook the conceptions of race in the United States at the Lincoln Memorial, Latino immigration activists boarded buses from California to Arizona in an attempt to mobilize the Latino vote against the Republican Party.
As the midterm elections draw near, both the Coffee and Tea Parties are striving to guard against other movements seeking to compromise their overall message. While both parties are radically different in an ideological sense, both grassroots factions must deal with respective obstacles.
Every political season there are calls to “take back our country” … or our city … or our state. It’s the standard cry of the opposition. The Democrats were all about “taking back our government” in 2008, and Republicans are all about it in 2010.
These days, it seems like we are provided with new evidence of the American public’s desire for Independent and third party alternatives to the Democratic and Republican parties on a regular basis.
Despite infighting and charges of racism from the NAACP, the Tea Party movement now has the political backing to stay relevant in the November midterms, gaining an official caucus in Congress.
Though it is almost universally accepted that the politics of the presidency make it virtually impervious to the efforts of independent and third party candidates, there is rarely ever any lack of speculation regarding their prospects. This fact is symptomatic of the public's deep discontent with the Democratic-Republican political establishment and the gridlocked two-party system. <
