Debate Society

Will Bunch pimps his book on the loons while "debating" somebody or another who's pimping his book on the loons, at The Daily Bleat.

Others would tell you a different story. This week here at The Daily Beast, I will be debating Douglas Schoen, co-author with fellow national polling guru Scott Rasmussen of another new book, Mad as Hell: How the Tea Party Movement Is Fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System. Their book agrees with mine on one key point: that the decimation of the U.S. middle class, a tragedy that has been decades in the making, marks a powerful tipping point for the anger in America today. But their broader conclusion, that the Tea Party movement is a powerful organic and independent force akin to a third party, flies in the face of evidence that the Obama backlash is largely a new “paranoid style” for a conservative and overwhelming Republican movement that has existed for decades. More important, in their eagerness to ignore the underlying currents of race and what Beck once called “white culture,” they ignore the roots of the conflagrations we now see on the Arizona border and at a proposed mosque site in Lower Manhattan. And they give shockingly short shrift to the critical role of the media and specifically a huckster such as Beck, whose tire treads are all over the Obama backlash, in whipping up fear for fun and profit, with no regard to the consequences.

Why does anyone bother? (Us included.)