On his radio program this morning, Glenn Beck talked about the NY Times Magazine article that I shared with my listeners (well, the first few pages of it, anyway — the entire piece runs ten pages online) last week.
Titled “Who’s Got a Grip on the GOP.
Glenn didn’t get beyond the first page — this is where he landed:
“I think it’s waning now,” Scott Reed, a veteran strategist and lobbyist, told me when we talked about the Tea Party’s influence last month. Efforts to gin up primaries next year against two sitting senators — Utah’s Orrin Hatch and Indiana’s Dick Lugar — have been slow to gain momentum, Reed said, and it’s notable that more than half of the 50-plus members of the Tea Party caucus in the House ultimately fell in line and voted with Speaker John Boehner on his debt-ceiling compromise. Party leaders have managed to bleed some of the anti-establishment intensity out of the movement, Reed said, by slyly embracing Tea Party sympathizers in Congress, rather than treating them as “those people.”
Did he mean to say that the party was slowly co-opting the Tea Partiers?
“Trying to,” Reed said. “And that’s the secret to politics: trying to control a segment of people without those people recognizing that you’re trying to control them.”
Let your tongue roll around those words while you try to wrap your mind around the hubris expressed. The secret to politics — trying to control a segment of people without those people recognizing that you’re trying to control them.
As Beck said, Edward Bernays, the father of public relations who advised the socialist progressive Woodrow Wilson, would be proud.
So would Geobbels…
