Time’s Joe Klein: Tea Party Will Be ‘Biggest Losers’ Next Year, Dream Act Opponents Will ‘Suffer’
Appearing as a panel member on Sunday’s syndicated Chris Matthews Show, Time columnist Joe Klein predicted that the Tea Party will be the "biggest losers" next year after he agreed with MSNBC’s Howard Fineman that the conservative movement represented the "biggest winners" this year. Klein: "I'm going to go with the Tea Party, with the caveat that even though they were the biggest winners of this year because they set the debate, they're going to be the biggest losers of next year because they're going to have to vote."
A bit earlier, after Fineman accused Nevada Republican Senate nominee Sharron Angle of running a "frankly racist ad about immigration against Hispanics," and alluded to the Republican Party’s challenge of winning Hispanic voters in the future, Klein predicted that opponents of the Dream Act would "suffer" as he chimed in: "I'm going to go with the Tea Party, with the caveat that even though they were the biggest winners of this year because they set the debate, they're going to be the biggest losers of next year because they're going to have to vote."
Below is a transcript of the relevant portion of the Sunday, December 26, syndicated Chris Matthews Show:
JOE KLEIN, TIME MAGAZINE: Pelosi, Pelosi, Pelosi, Pelosi.
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Shouldn’t have stayed.
KLEIN: Should not have stayed. I mean, the Democrats do best with their core constituency, the working people of this country. They need someone who reflects working people in the middle of the country to lead them. You know, for reasons, you know, it doesn’t make a difference whether it’s true or not, but people see Pelosi as sophisticated, San Francisco, out of the mainstream. She was who the Republicans ran against all year, not Barack Obama. And so I think that her staying on was an act of hubris.
...
HOWARD FINEMAN, HUFFINGTON POST: I think Joe’s absolutely right, but I would say that the biggest mistake of the year was Sharron Angle, who was running against Harry Reid in Nevada, putting on a frankly racist ad about immigration against Hispanics. What planet is she on? If the Republicans are going to have any chance of being a true majority party, they’re going to need a huge percentage of the Hispanic vote. George W. Bush in 2004 got 40 percent of it. She got less than 30 percent of it out there, or way down below. And Harry Reid won that race going away because of what Sharron Angle did. That is the exact huge mistake that all Republicans in the future have to somehow figure out how to come to grips with and avoid if they want to go forward.
KLEIN: It’s a disease that that party is suffering from.
FINEMAN: Absolutely.
KLEIN: The people who are opposing the Dream Act, which would enable Latino kids who want to go to college or into the military to have citizenship, those people are going to suffer.
...
MATTHEWS: Howard, you started this. Are you sticking with the all-time winner of the year?
FINEMAN: Well, I mentioned the Clintons personally, but I’m actually going to say the Tea Party because I know some people think it’s oversold and there’s a lot of counterjournalism saying, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that big a deal.’ It’s a huge deal. And they are going to be the driving force in the Congress over the next two years. It’s not going to be the liberal Democrats, it’s going to be the Tea Party.
...
KLEIN: I’m going to go with the Tea Party, with the caveat that even though they were the biggest winners of this year because they set the debate, they’re going to be the biggest losers of next year because they’re going to have to vote. And you’re going to see another Tea Party movement trying to restrain the- (INDAUDIBLE)
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Comments
Joe Shihtzu
Submitted by AgentAmerican on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 5:41pm.
Joe's tears are delicious.
Why couldn't they find a photo of him and Paul Weasel Krugman in a bathtub together?
Biggest Loser
Submitted by MidAmerica on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 5:44pm.
Biggest Loser of the Year?
They can't even bring themselves to consider it but it was without a doubt , Barack Obama . Not even Jimmie Carter crashed to earth as fast as the Messiah has.
Joe Klein is too little to be the biggest loser.
Submitted by needle on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 9:04pm.
However, the biggest loser of the year was Obama, the Liberal media’s creature. That makes Joe Klein the biggest loser that little Joe can be, considering how little he is in the first place.
- Looking forward to the self-annihilation of the Manipulated Stories Machine.
Revealing
Submitted by KyWriter on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 7:40pm.
Klein, Fineman and Matthews have unknowingly revealed the major Democratic strategy for the next two years: portray the Republican Party as anti-Hispanic and the Democratic Party as their savior. To do so will require a major gesture for Obama, such as replacing Hillary Clinton with Bill Richardson because of his Hispanic heritage. (Why would Richardson make a useless trip to North Korea except to reinforce his diplomatic cred?) Expect the MSM to harp on this theme ad nauseum, in addition to the usual screeds about Tea Party racism.
Of course, there is that pesky little problem of emerging Hispanic Republican leaders who had a bunch of Tea Party endorsements, like Marco Rubio, Jaime Herrara, Francisco Canseco, Raul Labrador, Bill Flores, David Rivera, or Brian Sandoval. Not to mention existing Hispanic Republicans like the Diaz-Balart brothers of Florida or Puerto Rican Governor Luis Fortuno. Come to think of it, both Jenniffer Gonzalez, Speaker of the House of Representative of Puerto Rico, and Thomas Rivera Shatz, President of the Puerto Rican Senate, are both Republicans. Republicans? In Hispanic Puerto Rico? Who woulda thunk it?
In fact, only Republican Hispanics were elected to Congress in 2010. Let's see how well this strategy plays out.
The dems think they can
Submitted by MidAmerica on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 8:25pm.
The dems think they can create a solid voting bloc out of the Hispanics as they have done with the Blacks. Won't work. Hispanics are very different culturally from Blacks AND from each other.
Look at LA
Submitted by jon_torlin on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 8:37pm.
Look at the gangs in LA, one gang is full of hispanics, the other's full of blacks and they HATE each other. That's a full on turf war right there.
The libs would crap their pants if they ever got caught in the middle of that.
-Jon
Hillary Clinton can only leave under her terms
Submitted by Galvanic on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 12:11pm.
If there is even a perception that Hillary Clinton was forced to step down from her Secretary of State position, the Democratic elites will split in a civil war that would absolutely wreck their chances in 2012.
If she leaves office, it must be under her terms -- even if it's to run for the Democratic Presidential nomination (which itself could spilt the elites).
The Democratic strategy for 2012 relies heavily on the return of young Dem and independent voters who turned out to elect Obama in 2008; their absence in 2010 had drastic effects on the Democratic representation in Congress. If they can energize or coerce those voters to come out, they think they have a chance to retain the White House and the Senate. Part of the strategy will be to ratchet up the Fear Factor by painting the Republicans as a far worse alternative. They'll probably try to enact some government giveaways targeted at the 35-and-under group.
The teaparty will lose???
Submitted by danbo on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 7:46pm.
If we had wanted people to vote the way Obama, the dims and the media wanted. We only had to vote democratic.
Who's clueless?
But then. We're not smart enough to know what we want or need.
"You lie!" Rep. Joe Wilson R-(SC)
Liberal logic, always
Submitted by ant on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 9:08pm.
Liberal logic, always puzzling. An ad portraying illegal aliens as mostly hispanic is racist because it's supposed to be untrue, but a bill to send illegal alien youth to college will anger hispanics if not passed. So if Republicans don't vote to keep illegal aliens happy they will make a majority of hispanics angry with them, but at the same time don't say illegal aliens are mostly hispanic. OK, my head is spinning but I think I got it. I think the left's real plan for 2011 is to give conservatives a brain annuerism(sic) by trying to understand their positions.
On a similar note, I hear two illegal amnesty groups are protesting DUI checkpoints in Cali because too many illegals are being netted for not just DUI but driving unlicensed as well. One was quoted as saying, [ They are harrasing the working man, the undocumented worker, who aside from lacking proper licenses and documents, is behaving lawfully]. Again, it's the brain stroke thingy.
I would bet 100 bucks
Submitted by ghost of Mary J... on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 9:52pm.
Joe has Birkenstocks on with that suit.
Support Our Troops. God bless the US military.
http://adoptaplatoon.org/
Joe Klein is the worst ........
Submitted by chazzy-kc on Mon, 12/27/2010 - 10:12pm.
....of the sniveling eastern elitist journolistas. He is singularly inclined to judge all between the Hudson and the Pacific as brain dead, uneducated dolts who fall woefully shy of near enough intellectual heft to understand his snooty drivel. He is a living, breathing, caricature of himself.
Democrats will lose a lot of
Submitted by humanzee on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 12:44pm.
Democrats will lose a lot of hispanic support in the next election. They can only blame the GOP so much.
1) The legal hispanic community has been stupid to put all its eggs in the Democrat basket. The spanish TV and print media is pro-illegal to the bone. Legal hispanics are wasting their time and money chasing the interests of people no one invited into the country and people who have yet to cross the border. It's a stupid waste of resources.
US born hispanics have a lot of problems. A lot of immigrant hispanics have US born children. Time for them to worry about their own.
Obama and the Democrats were able to buy RINO Republicans to pass the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell but were unable to garner enough votes for the DREAM ACT.
The Dream Act is dead, stop beating a dead horse. Time for hispanics to focus on their domestic legal population.
Hispanics are the bottom of the Democrat food chain. Obama has hooked up the gays, unions, and coastal white liberals but hasn't give the hispanic constituents anything at all.
So... why do they vote Democrat?