2009 will go down as the year of the angry voter

With this being the last day of the year and the decade, print and Internet publications have been flooding the zone in recent days with their retrospective looks back.

In the current issue of CL, we examine the top 10 stories of the decade in Tampa Bay.  In this morning's Tampa Tribune, the editors there have submitted their top stories of 2009 in the Bay area.

I've not done such a review of  2009, but as I look back on some of the biggest stories I covered for WMNF radio and Creative Loafing this year politically, it was undoubtedly easy to label this The Year of the Angry Voter.

Tea parties were all the rage, weren't they?  I covered several this year.  The first one was in Tampa's Lykes Gaslight Square Park on tax day, April 15th.  There were several hundred in attendance.  What I recall more than anything else from that event was one woman who almost mechanically was denouncing one of the right's favorite targets in recent years, ACORN.  She was insisting to me that the community activist group was getting millions from the recently signed stimulus bill.

I argued that was not specified in the legislation.  As PoliFact reported, ACORN was theoretically able to compete for funds in the bill.  Of course, that was before Congress passed legislation making sure that the group would not get any federal money.  (Legislation that a federal judge recently ruled was a "bill of attainder" and thus unconstitutional).

Anyway, getting back to the April 15th rally, I questioned the woman about the voracity of her comment.  That's when a fellow Tea Bagger came to her rescue, angrily saying that she was right, and if I didn't believe her, we could go across the street and into his office off Ashley Drive, and he would show me his copy of the bill stating that.

Obviously, I wasn't about to leave the rally to do so, which is what I told him.  He then told me off, saying I was scared to learn the truth.  I'd seen glimpses of this kind of fervor on the right at rallies in late 2008  — for instance, people handing out badges at a Sarah Palin event in Clearwater comparing Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden — but it was clear that with the election of Obama, the passions were even higher.

I went to similar rallies in Brandon and Lakeland.  But none of those events carried the intensity of probably the political event of the year in Tampa Bay, the town hall meeting featuring Tampa Democrat Kathy Castor last August at the Children's Board in Ybor City.

Here is the radio story I produced for WMNF on the event.  Part of the problem that led to it being almost destined to blow up was a simple supply and demand issue — over 500 people attended the event held in a room that could barely contain over 200.  Although the anti-health care reform citizens were already angry, that anger was exacerbated by the fact that members of the SEIU, who were organizing the event with Democratic State Representative Betty Reed, as well as some others associated with the Hillsborough Democratic Party , were allowed early entrance into the room, while others stood outside, baking in the unforgiving Florida summer heat and humidity.

The meeting quickly devolved into chaos, and at times there was some serious tension in the air. There was pushing and shoving, and nasty pejorative comments uttered by people sitting right next to each other.

There was only one uniformed Tampa police officer inside the room (though I was told there were others in plainclothes).  Whatever.  It certainly didn't seem that there was adequate security.

Castor ended up leaving the meeting early, angering some of the health care critics even further.

Her next and only other town hall meeting during the August break was done by conference call.

Similar chaotic events happened throughout the summer as well, which is a strong reason why Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid played all the parliamentary tricks that he could this past month to get a bill passed before the Christmas holiday break.

(Although South Florida Democrat Ron Klein apparently was grilled on health care earlier this week at a forum, showing that the intensity hasn't gone away.)

The evolution of this anger at the federal government really began, of course, in September of 2008, when the entire political establishment embraced the $700 billion Wall Street bailout (well, that's not fair, as a number of members of Congress, such as Castor and Brooksville's Ginny Brown-Waite, voted against the legislation).

Barack Obama's $787 billion stimulus was (and remains) extremely controversial.  Then there was his administration saving two of the big auto companies.  Then came a $410 billion omnibus spending bill in March that critics insisted that he veto.

Couple that with the ongoing recession and unemployment problems and the lack of access to credit, and it isn't hard to figure out the country's anger at the federal government. Even though some commentators (including myself) have written that it's extremely hypocritical to claim that it's Obama who is bankrupting the country when still the huge majority of the federal deficit can be traced to the administration of George W. Bush, Obama has done nothing in his first year to curb that debt.  But his administration knows this is a growing problem, which is why they say they will begin addressing the issue in 2010.

With all of this negativity, Florida Governor Charlie Crist should be pleased with his poll ratings (at 58% according to the last Quinnipiac survey), which, though not nearly as huge as they were back in 2007, stack up well compared to several other governors from big states (check out Arnold Schwarzenegger's in California or David Paterson's in New York for example).

Although politicians are rightly criticized for their lack of courage, give Washington Democrats this:  most polls show the country against the health care reform bills that Congress has passed.  Yet the Dems know that if one of the things people are unhappy about is the lack of results for the citizenry, then perhaps passing a health care bill that nobody really loves but contains important measures to address the 40-something million who lack insurance, is ultimately worth it.

Of course, whether it truly will be or not is a different story.  The Democrats could suffer greatly because of this issue in 2010 — and maybe beyond, since currently the legislation won't even kick in until 2014.

But the Tea Party movement hasn't just been a stalking horse for Republicans.  My encounters with many people at such events (or similar ones, like the Glenn Beck book signing in Tampa in November) is that they want to "throw all the bums out."   As we head into 2010, that anger shows no signs of dissipating.

This article appears in Dec 30, 2009 – Jan 5, 2010.