Why the conversation between President Obama and Tea Party Activists was a good thing.

If you listen to all the cable news channels, you may be hyped to think that this encounter was similar to a huge battle between two titans and should have been on pay-per-view.  That was no where near the case and leave it to cable news to build drama like TNT whose motto is “We know Drama’. 

The AFP reports in their article titled Obama spars with Tea Party activist that “US President Barack Obama went head-to-head with a prominent conservative Tea Party activist, Ryan Rhodes, a leader of the group in Iowa, took on Obama during an open-air town hall meeting, which marked a moment of new intensity in the president's campaign for a second term.  Rhodes shouted out that the president's calls for more civility in politics had little chance of coming to pass after "your vice president is calling people like me, a Tea Party member, and a ‘terrorist”.  Obama reportedly responded by saying "In fairness, since I have been called a socialist who wasn't born in this country, who is destroying America and taking away its freedoms because I passed a health care bill, I am all for lowering the rhetoric."

Why was this exchange a good thing?  Mainly because it proves that this Tea Party is no longer a grassroots movement but a group of individuals who each adopt his/her own stand and gets a few friends to join them.  It’s about several groups of people who have only in common the words Tea Party before their manicure that separates them.  It’s about several groups of people which allow the media to define them and can not justify or define themselves.  They say that they stand for less government while backing the abortion police to monitor every pregnancy in America.  They love this country but are willing to allow it to fold just to show up a person that they still do not believe was even born here.  The Tea Party truly did start off as a grassroots movement but when they saw all of the money that they could make; it quickly turned into a business.  This exchange between President Obama and Mr. Ryan Rhodes proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Tea Party is now a franchise and nothing more.

Need more proof consider how this exchange started?  Mr. Rhodes stood up without being called on or raising his hand like everyone else and yelled out at the President of the United States.  This would have been seen as uncivil if it had been directed to any other president but it seems okay for this one.  He exposed himself further because after demanding a lowering of the rhetoric he doubled down on calling this president a socialist directly afterwards.  But the best evidence can be found in this very same article when it reports that “the Tea Party lacks a centralized national leadership.”   This makes them a franchise because like any other business franchise, you carry the same products and enjoy the same media exposure but when it comes to dealing with its leadership, in the words of Forrest Gump, “you’re dealing with a box of chocolates”.