Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party compared
28 Nov 2014 Leave a comment
in income redistribution, liberalism, Marxist economics, politics - USA, rentseeking Tags: corporate welfare, Occupy Wall Street, rent seeking, tea party, top 1%
What do Ross Perot and the Tea Party have in common?
20 Apr 2014 Leave a comment
in politics - USA, Public Choice Tags: Ross Perot, tea party
Popular uprisings are common in US politics. Of late, there has been the Tea Party, Moveon.org and the anti-Iraq war movement.
Remember Ross Perot? He was a well-mannered, TV friendly version of the Tea Party. Perot won 19% of the presidential vote in 1992, and 8.4% in 1996.
Perot appealed to disaffected voters across the political spectrum who had grown weary of the two-party system. NAFTA played a role in Perot’s support, and Perot voters were relatively moderate on hot button social issues.
Perot siphoned votes nearly equally among Bush and Clinton in 1992, but of the voters who cited Bush’s broken "No New Taxes" pledge as "very important," two thirds voted for Clinton.
Attacking Perot as politically unrefined, arrogant and more than a little unstable did not do any good in 1992. Just made him fight harder and also belittled the concerns of his potential supporters thus turning them even more against the major party candidates.
The worst way to ask for someone’s vote is to belittle what troubles them and insult them personally to round things off.
Combining fiscal conservatism with social moderation was Clinton’s response to the Perot insurgency by the time of the 1996 election; adapt or lose office. Clinton was re-elected easily. This made him the first elected incumbent Democratic president to be re-elected since Roosevelt.
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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