Nancy Pelosi Offers the Tea Party Unity With Progressives

Last updated on August 10th, 2014 at 05:04 pm

Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was on ABC’s This Week this morning, where she made an interesting offer to the tea party movement. Pelosi claimed that the tea partiers share the same view as progressives on the issue of the special interests, so they should work together on that issue. Of course, since the tea party is now controlled by special interests, her offer will be rejected.

Here is the video:

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When asked about the tea party movement, Pelosi said, “the Republican Party directs a lot of what the Tea Party does, but not everybody in the Tea Party takes direction from the Republican Party. And so there was a lot of, shall we say, Astroturf, as opposed to grassroots. But, you know, we share some of the views of the Tea Partiers in terms of the role of special interest in Washington, D.C., as — it just has to stop.”

The strategy which the Democrats have adopted starting with the healthcare summit is to move to the middle and offer common ground with the right. If Republicans continue to turn them down, then they paint themselves as the party of out of touch extremism, while the Democrats can appeal to voters in the middle of the political spectrum.

As far as the tea parties themselves are concerned, as Pelosi herself said today, much of this movement is being funded and directed by the Republican Party and right wing special interests. There are smaller organic tea party groups that are leftover from the Ron Paul presidential campaign in 2008, but these genuine tea partiers have been dwarfed by the corporatized GOP takeover of their movement.

Pelosi’s offer of unity with progressives on the issue of special interests is designed to expose much of the fraudulent nature of the movement. If the tea partiers are sincerely interested in battling the special interests, then they should work with anyone, but if they are nothing more than a tool of the GOP, they will scoff at Pelosi’s offer. Most of the tea partiers are nothing more than unwitting participants in a special interest lobbying campaign, and these are the people that Pelosi was speaking to.