The impact of Tea Parties

Americans in all 50 states are holding “tea parties” on Wednesday, said Glenn Harlan Reynolds in The Wall Street Journal, and this is not some part of a “grand right-wing conspiracy.” These gatherings are for “ordinary folks” fed up with “higher taxes and out-of-control government spending.” This grassroots effort may revitalize the small-government cause.

You wish, said Joan Walsh in Salon. These gimmicky protests are “the work of a small, if increasingly angry, echo chamber of Obama obstructionists” who are hopelessly out of touch. President Obama has kept his campaign promise and lowered taxes for roughly 95 percent of Americans—so the “shrill” Tea Party protests won't hurt the president’s popularity.

Maybe, said Jon Kraushar in FoxNews, and maybe they'll “augur a major change stemming from growing dissatisfaction among the American electorate.” At the moment, there is no leader in the opposition who can match Obama’s allure—but that will change if a conservative leader can harness the growing anger at the bailouts and “breathtaking amount of government control” Obama is engineering.

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Don’t count on it—conservative leaders have lost their “political bearings,” said Marc Cooper in the Los Angeles Times. Nobody likes handing billions to “teetering banks and corporations.” But most Americans are sophisticated enough to get that the bailouts—“unlike the Bush lollipop tax cuts”—are “a radical, emergency measure to help Americans keep their jobs, their homes, and their retirement.”