Clearer picture of tea partiers emerging in establishment media

Things are looking up--they've never looked down by the way, for the tea party movement. As I wrote earlier today, the establishment media is giving tea partiers more respect.

Such as Jonathan Gurwitz in the San Antonio News-Express:

What do they want? Well, no one seems to have polled about cross burnings or racial purity tests. But a Winston Group poll found tea partiers united around two core issues: the economy/jobs and reducing the deficit.

In short, the profile of the tea party movement and the concerns of its members aren't that much different from the American people as a whole. "Overall, this survey paints a picture of the tea party movement that encompasses a broad swath of the American middle class," reads a statement from Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, which conducted another tea party poll.

None of this will come as a surprise to anyone who has actually taken the time to go to a tea party event and talk to tea party members rather than rely on willful misrepresentations of them as hillbillies and racists. But those misrepresentations — based on a handful of incidents at thousands of events involving millions of people — rather than reflecting reality reveal the panicked hope that the tea party will simply disappear.

One year after it emerged on the political scene and despite all the derision and disrespect, the tea party movement is stronger, more focused and more politically mature. With Washington oblivious to its core concerns, there's no reason to believe it won't be just as vigorous a year from now — or, more important, on Nov. 2.

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