Obama and Reid Scared by the Ghost of the Tea Party

(Thomas Mitchell/4TH ST8) Apparently Harry and Barry have seen a ghost and it has scared the hell out of them.

On the stump, Obama has now mentioned the tea party five times in two days, the first time he has invoked the name of the informal libertarian movement all year, according to Politico. He said Romney is “pledging to rubber-stamp the tea party agenda in Congress … That’s not change. That’s what we need to change.”

I’ve not heard Romney mention the tea party, but Harry Reid used it three times in a statement released Friday by Talking Points Memo in which he declared he would block Romney’s agenda if he is elected Tuesday.

Back in January Reid declared the tea party movement was dying because the economy was rapidly improving. Either the tea party survived the improving economy or the economy did not, in fact, improve — with unemployment still standing at 7.9 percent and home prices still stagnant.

Reid said:

“In fact, Mitt Romney’s Tea Party agenda has already been rejected in the Senate. In the past few months, we have voted down many of the major policies that Mitt Romney has run on, from the Ryan plan to end Medicare as we know it, to the Blunt Amendment to deny women access to contraception, to more tax giveaways for millionaires and billionaires, to a draconian spending plan that would gut critical services for seniors and the most vulnerable Americans.

“Mitt Romney has demonstrated that he lacks the courage to stand up to the Tea Party, kowtowing to their demands time and again. There is nothing in Mitt Romney’s record to suggest he would act any differently as president. As governor of Massachusetts, he had a terrible relationship with Democrats, cordoning himself off behind a velvet rope instead of reaching out to build relationships. And in the near-decade that Mitt Romney has spent running for president, both his words and his actions have shown that pleasing the far right is more important to him than working across the aisle.

“Senate Democrats are committed to defending the middle class, and we will do everything in our power to defend them against Mitt Romney’s Tea Party agenda.”

That agenda includes a desire to stop borrowing 40 cents of every dollar spent and possibly pass a budget in the Senate for the first time in three and a half years — not since April 29, 2009. The tea partiers advocate free markets, limited government and adherence to the Constitution.

But Harry and Barry want nothing to do with that, because it would limit their ability to throw government money to their cronies and contributors. That’s not the change they want.

And, quite frankly, Romney is hardly the darling of the tea party crowd.