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Opposing views regarding the best direction for the tea party movement recently landed on the websites of two of the world's leading news agencies – hinting at the intensifying implications both arguments will hold in influencing the outcome of the mid-term elections.
As leaders of the faction focused exclusively on fiscal issues, FreedomWorks founders Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe wrote in the Wall Street Journal of their demands for "fiscal policies that limit government, restrain spending, promote market reforms in health care – and oppose Obamacare, tax hikes and cap-and-trade restrictions that will kill job creation and stunt economic growth."
The pair thundered that the "tea party movement is not seeking a junior partnership with the Republican Party, but a hostile takeover of it."
But in contemplating the "success of the Tea Party – and the reason Republicans find it difficult to harness," Mark Mardell, BBC's North America editor, wondered "is the Christian Right really at its heart, and on its way back?"
"I've just read a small book, entitled 'The Tea Party Manifesto," by Joseph Farah, who, according to the blurb on the back, 'was a Tea Partier before there even was a Tea Party movement,'" writes Mardell. "He argues that the Tea Party is made up of 'prayerful people' and that it is a mistake to divide economics from social and moral issues. ... (H)e says that it is time for the Tea Party to connect with its Christian roots."
In Farah posits that godly morality must provide the moorings, rudder and compass for any American movement intent on stopping the descending spiral into socialism and reclaiming any hope for a free and lasting society.
FreedomWorks, Mardell notes, adopts a different strategy.
"They say Tea Partiers are united by their desire to keep the deficit down, government small and taxes low," he writes. "Whatever individual members think about guns or gays, they say, stays outside the Tea Party."
In covering both Farah's book and Armey's and Kibbe's "Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto," the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Bob Hoover wrote, "It's important to realize that these books come with lots of strings attached to right-wing causes. Tea party members interested in independence might keep those connections in mind."
Actually, warns Farah, the more those priorities zero in on materialistic issues above all others, the less they resemble "right-wing causes" and the more they mirror left-wing ones.
"Since when are we concerned only about economic issues and materialistic issues?" Farah said in a recent radio interview. "That's the Left's turf. They know this turf. They defined it. Marx and Engels. 'We live in a materialistic world. Everything's material. Everything's economic.' And now the Right is going to fight back exclusively on that ground?"
Farah has warned Fox News superstar Glenn Beck against falling in the "materialistic worldview with Marx, Engels and Saul Alinsky" by ignoring the unintended consequences of social issues such as same-sex marriage.
In the end, the fiscal fixation is a rebranding of the "big tent" political philosophy, which Farah has called a strategy with "30 years of failure."
A recent event by the Boston Tea Party reportedly was cancelled over "big tent Tea Party Republicans'" fears about the inclusion of a speaker representing MassResistance, which openly has opposed the homosexual-rights agenda.
"Most folks in the Tea Party movement recognize that it is far worse for a nation to be morally and spiritually bankrupt than to be fiscally bankrupt," writes Renew America's Bryan Fischer, "and are in the movement, at least in part, because they are alarmed at the moral drift in this country and want to do something about it."