Read @ Huffington Post

'On Point': Arianna Discusses Third World America, Barack Obama and Homer Simpson

• On the Importance of the Middle Class: The middle class is what has made us a first-world nation in the sense that we didn't have what you see in Mexico and Brazil, which is the rich and everyone else.

The middle class has always been aspirational in this country, as opposed to vengeful and envious. Because there's always been the assumption that, 'I can work hard and play by the rules and I can be rich too.' That's been the American Dream, right? And that's why people have not even objected to tax cuts for the rich... Right now... people are feeling... we're not all in the same game, there are two games going on. There's the Wall Street game, where you get bailed out if you fail, and you do very well. And there's the game for the rest of us.

[snip]

• On Tea Partiers: The Tea Party is a fascinating phenomenon because at the heart of it is that sense of unfairness, that sense that 'we're not all in the same game'. Sure they blame government, but for the first time we have something that we can all blame government for, and that is the bailout of Wall Street, which was really the product of all establishments coming together -- Republican, Democratic political establishments -- led by George W. Bush, but with Obama and the Democratic leadership following on. They bailed out Wall Street without any conditions, without any strings attached. It is really extraordinary because it is so against the capitalist system.

• On Obama's Role in the Recession: The single most important thing that happened is that he brought the wrong people to run economic policy. He brought in Larry Summers, who was one of the architects of Glass-Steagal which basically ended protections put in place by the New Deal. He brought in Tim Geithner... these are smart people, but they are completely Wall Street-centric and they completely underestimated the economic crisis...

When you're the President of the United States, personnel is policy. If you put the wrong people in control -- and he did that -- you're in trouble.

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Quite interesting coming from Arianna.   I'd wager she was saturated in koolaid until not very long ago.  Quite a CHANGE indeed!  LOL

I disagree with Arianna to some degree on Tea Party.. That may be how it started.. but that is not what it is today. Today, a large majority of the Tea Party is mired in the socialist agenda of both religion and choice/life.  The tag there is not "conservative" - I'd tag them as "INSULAR" for to be conservative you would really love the conservatism of muslims... but they do not.  So, the tea party sites almost sound like, I want to go back to the days of my grandparents and reverse the progress.. except Internet, YouTube, F words, women's advancement (forget they played little part in it), the massive shift in demographics (age, religion mix, tan-color mix) of the population.  So, they use the reference to "Founders" because no one dare refute that!  Oh well, they forget that the nation was Founded on the land of the Native Americans whose law was the law of nature and inclusion, where a guest is equivalent to a "god" like spirit - they welcomed those who later became "Founders" and it took more learned people to come and formulate the Constitution and even more learned people and collective power of the people of the US via various Amendments for the Constitution to evolve to what we have today.  So, to pin the Tea Party as a reaction to the stimulus and leave it at that is a massive simplification of Tea Party and ignoring the entire saga of coopting the Tea Party that GOP has been upto. It is only when they realize that Tea Party has resulted in a few possibly unelectable primary choices for the GOP that they wake up and dither.

If they so want to embrace centrists, why not do so and let go of that far extreme

My DH explains it so:

Current distribution is roughly:  Left = 30%  Center = 40%  Right = 30% of the Likely-to-vote population.

So, neither the Left nor the Right can afford to leave their extreme ends, because the Center is not larger than 50%.

Time for the Center to grow among the voting population....
OR
we need Center to show up to the booths in MASSIVE numbers
and elect those unaffiliated with either end!