Tea Party will be hard to ignore now

How do you like those tea baggers now, Anderson Cooper?

The snarky CNN anchor tagged members of the Tea Party movement with that derisive moniker, taken from a gay sex act, last spring as they began to coalesce in opposition to the national health care bill. His fellow members of the Barack Obama media support team chortled at the irony of a conservative movement inadvertently identifying itself with anything homosexual and cited it as evidence of the Tea Partiers' cluelessness.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi labeled their massive protests and boisterous showings at congressional town halls as "Astroturf," meaning they were Republican-organized events posing as a grass-roots campaign. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called them Nazis. And the national media all but ignored the Tea Party rally on the Washington Mall, which dwarfed other marches that garnered far more press.

The Washington elites disdained and dismissed the Tea Partiers. But it's going to be hard to ignore them now. Tuesday's stunning upset win of the Massachusetts Senate seat held for nearly half a century by the late Ted Kennedy speaks to the strength of a movement that threatens to turn Washington inside out this fall.

The Tea Party Express roared into the Bay State on behalf of Republican Scott Brown, carrying the simple message that Obama and congressional Democrats are out of touch with the issues that most concern Americans: taxes, spending and jobs.

Polls taken before Tuesday's balloting indicate that Massachusetts voters were perfectly aligned with the Tea Party's agenda, citing those three issues as their primary motivators.

Health care reform and climate change, the two priorities that have preoccupied the ruling Democrats for the past year, barely made the radar screen.

Democrats are spinning their loss in the bluest of states as the fault of a bad candidate who ran a very bad campaign. True, Martha Coakley was a gift to the GOP.

But dig into the polls and you find broad discontent with the direction Obama and his fellow Democrats are taking the country.

Democrats dismissed earlier Republican upsets in New Jersey and Virginia. But Massachusetts is harder to explain away. Democrats lost this one on their own turf, with Obama solidly in the game.

This defeat wasn't delivered by the Republican Party, but by everyday citizens bound by principle instead of partisanship. They're mad as hell and they're not going to take it anymore.

That anger could just as easily be turned toward Republican incumbents, if they don't push themselves away from the pork barrel.

Last month, I spoke to a group of about 300 Tea Partiers in Macomb County and came away understanding that they want nothing to do with party labels or traditional politics. They're fiercely independent.

The Massachusetts polling bears that out; 44 percent of voters in a state once overwhelmingly Democratic now call themselves independent. They decided this election. Note that Brown never mentioned the words Republican or Democrat in his victory speech. He understands what post-partisan really means.

It's fitting that a movement that draws its inspiration from the American Revolution helped score such a major victory in the home of the original Tea Party. Until now, no one wanted to listen to the Tea Partiers. But this is the people speaking, and they'll have a lot more to say in November.

Nolan Finley is editorial page editor of The Detroit News. nfinley@detnews.com">nfinley@detnews.com