September 28, 2010: Obama: ‘Tea Party’ Still ‘Defining Itself’

In a wide-ranging interview with Rolling Stone magazine, President Obama says that he believes the loose amalgamation of groups and organizations under the “tea party” rubric is “still defining itself.” Obama says: “I think the tea party is an amalgam, a mixed bag of a lot of different strains in American politics that have been there for a long time. There are some strong and sincere libertarians who are in the tea party who generally don’t believe in government intervention in the market or socially. There are some social conservatives in the tea party who are rejecting me the same way they rejected Bill Clinton, the same way they would reject any Democratic president as being too liberal or too progressive. There are strains in the tea party that are troubled by what they saw as a series of instances in which the middle-class and working-class people have been abused or hurt by special interests and Washington, but their anger is misdirected. And then there are probably some aspects of the tea party that are a little darker, that have to do with anti-immigrant sentiment or are troubled by what I represent as the president. So I think it’s hard to characterize the tea party as a whole, and I think it’s still defining itself.” Asked how the tea parties are being financed, Obama says: “There’s no doubt that the infrastructure and the financing of the tea party come from some very traditional, very powerful, special-interest lobbies. I don’t think this is a secret. Dick Armey and FreedomWorks (see May 16, 2008, April 14, 2009, and April 15, 2009), which was one of the first organizational mechanisms to bring tea party folks together, are financed by very conservative industries and forces that are opposed to enforcement of environmental laws, that are opposed to an energy policy that would be different than the fossil-fuel-based approach we’ve been taking, that don’t believe in regulations that protect workers from safety violations in the workplace, that want to make sure that we are not regulating the financial industries in ways that we have. There’s no doubt that there is genuine anger, frustration, and anxiety in the public at large about the worst financial crisis we’ve experienced since the Great Depression. Part of what we have to keep in mind here is this recession is worse than the Ronald Reagan recession of the eighties, the 1990-91 recession, and the 2001 recession combined. The depths of it have been profound. This body politic took a big hit in the gut, and that always roils up our politics, and can make people angry. But because of the ability of a lot of very well-funded groups to point that anger—I think misdirect that anger—it is translating into a relevant political force in this election.” [Rolling Stone, 9/28/2010]