Coffee - Finding Common Ground on Changing the Political Culture"
The Conventional wisdom is that the Tea Party represents the far right and the
Coffee Party Movement the left. This makes it easy to categorize and pre-judge
their respective opinions, but this over-generalization is not accurate. Two of
us, from seemingly different sides of the track, sat down to discover that what
brings us together far exceeded what divides us: Dale Robertson, the Founder of
the Modern Day Tea Party. And Paul Silver, a member of the Coffee Party
Movement and other campaign reform groups. The core beliefs of the Tea Party
are Fiscal Responsibility, Limited Government, and Free Markets. The Coffee
Party wants to promote cooperation in government, recognizing that the federal
government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective
will. The principles are quite general.
We found each other when Dale was mentioned in an article on possible common ground with
Democrats We started talking after that and this piece represents our personal
conversation and doesn't necessarily represent our colleagues.
First, we agreed that the inflammatory conflicts between conservatives and liberals are
mostly a proxy war promoted by special interests (insurance companies, banks,
trial lawyers, unions, etc) aiming to manipulate public opinion and public
policy. A predatory special interest cannot admit that it wants to dilute air
and water regulations, so it backs a candidate willing to carry their cause
with the well-funded argument that over-regulation is hurting our national
competitiveness and ability to create jobs. Unions might make similar
arguments.
After laying a foundation of common ground we found that we were not that far apart on most
other issues. To be sure, there were areas of disagreement, but we think there
are areas where reasonable people can disagree and the appropriate grist for a
representative government free of special interest manipulation can exist. As
our conversation meandered, we saw some level of consensus on many
things—nonpartisan redistricting, the need for comprehensive immigration
reform, sensible gun control laws, deficit reduction.
We agree that the solution is a new campaign system that helps to neutralize the financial influence
of predatory special interests--the Fair Elections Now Act. With Fair
Elections, public office is more accessible to citizens without wealth or
connections to it. We want to expand speech and replace a handful of bundlers
with thousands of small contributors. Fair Elections would allow members of
Congress to focus on the needs of their constituents, instead of worrying about
their next campaign check.
We share distress at the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC that threw out
decades of common sense restrictions on corporate and union electioneering.
Members of Congress already spend too much time raising campaign cash, giving
constituents and the policy-making process short shrift. Now with the added
fear of political reprisal from deep-pocketed special interests, the
fundraising pressure will only increase. Congress’ first response, the DISCLOSE
Act, doesn’t go nearly far enough to fix this broken system.
No doubt we will find more areas of agreement as we continue to talk.
Our country faces many challenges and there are differing views on they should be
confronted. We may come from different backgrounds, but we both agree that
members of Congress must start doing the work for which they were elected—to
represent us. That won’t happen as long as they have to spend so much of their
time dialing for dollars.
This is what two average citizens, looking from what at first seemed like different points
on the political spectrum, discovered about ourselves when we looked past first
impressions and simplistic media analyses. We were both relatively centrist
when we got into the meat of the issues - sometimes liberal sometimes
conservative. But certainly more aligned than the media would lead you to
believe.
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