There’s a reason that most sound bites in the news are less than seven seconds long; in the modern media, that’s considered the limit of the typical viewer’s \u00a0attention span.<\/p>\n
Ditto for political slogans and memes. \u00a0It’s easy for someone to say, for example, “Tom Emmer’s opposition to gay marriage means he hates gays” – it’s a simple little line that takes mere seconds to ingrain itself into the minds of the susceptible; un-ingraining it takes long, detailed, attention-span-burning minutes to debunk.<\/p>\n
The budget battle is one of those things.<\/p>\n
The Tea Party was based – as it should have been – around a couple of simple but vital ideas; cut spending, reduce taxes, reduce the size of government.<\/p>\n
It was those ideas that, as a matter of fact, won the Novembe 2010 election for the GOP.<\/p>\n
Now, there are a lot of conservatives complaining that the GOP – in Saint Paul and in DC – have lost the way lit by those simple directions.<\/p>\n
The complicated answer: \u00a0we only control the House of Representatives in Washington; any legislation favorite by the Tea Party needs to pass a hostile Senate and a president who, if he shows up for work, will veto it if it’s too far outside his comfort zone. \u00a0 Much as it irritates Tea Partiers, it’s taken some old-fashioned politics to get things this far<\/a>.<\/p>\n In fact, the complicated part is that last week’s budget wasn’t really “the budget”; the debate was over, and the cuts were to, the discrtionary spending budget, which is a small fraction of the government’s multi-trillion dollar behemoth. \u00a0The bad news: the GOP had to hold off on some cuts. \u00a0The good news? \u00a0Commitments to up-or-down votes that’ll be useful in next year’s campaign to take the Senate. Because without the Senate and, hopefully, the Presidency, real reform is costly-to-impossible.<\/p>\n