thank you joan walsh and thank you john heilemann. up next, the white house has a couple big wins to brag about lately. they are winning on wall street reform. they will get unemployment extensions and we ll get to see all the playing on main street with pennsylvania governor ed rendell. this is hardball only on msnbc.
party takes over and the mad hatters it start writing the platform, joan, it s going to be kind of odd. i m older than you. i can remember when the republican senators basically passed the civil rights bill back in 64. led by everitt dirksen. they were all moderates. all reasonable people and they believed in civil rights. can you imagine this crowd meeting and passing a civil rights bill? no. they would not do that. they would not. you know, john is right about this. there s going to be an empirical test. it s not going to be perfect. there will be, you know, eccentricities to it, but there s going to be a test in november, and i m of the opinion that many democrats will do better, at least partly because these people scare independents. stan greenberg s pole showed that if they polled the non-tea partiers what, due think about the tea party, 56% said they are way too extreme and only 17% said they shared their values, so they drive away independents when, you know, part of the gam
welcome back to hardball. that s, of course, u.s. congresswoman michele bachmann announcing the formation of the tea party caucus today. then she went on to say the tea party, what they will and will not stand for. here she is laying down its principles. let s listen. i am not the head of the tea party nor are any of the members of congress the head of the tea party movement. the people are the head of the tea party movement in all of their forms. we are also not here to vouch for the tea party or to vouch for any tea party organizations or to vouch for any individual people or actions or billboards or signs or anything of the tea party. we are hear to listen and to be a receptacle. wow. what will the formation of a tea party movement caucus, actually in this case, mean for the republican party and for democrats running against caucus members? joan walsh is editor of salon.com and john heilmann is
set themselves up and they had to repudiate or refudiate as sarah palin would say all the crazy tea party ideas and billboards, et cetera, coming out, they would be there all day and they would be very busy and they would be very sad and unhappy. so they ve got a tea party caucus but it doesn t speak for the tea party or talk about anything the tea party believes. okay. fine. john, they can t i was going to say that they would be responsible, as joan said, for ripping down the racist signs at every one of the tea party events. yeah. you can practically see them at. here we have a membership which now includes one, two, three, four, five u.s. congress people who have just joined the tea party caucus who were also already birthers. this there they are. they are already people that don t think this guy is an american. they think he s an illegal alien. of course they are going to join the tea party caucus. i would assume that they re charter members because of what they believe a
most of it? well, she s going to her deepest base. i would also say, i ll give her this much credit. i think she believes some of this crazy stuff so i don t think she s only being an opportunist. i really think she believes it and i think she s a little bit dangerous because she believes it, that she thinks a lot of us are un-american and that there should be an investigation into our beliefs, et cetera, but i believe she holds her ideas sincerely. there s they are very bad ideas, and when the american electorate gets really exposed to the full spectrum of ideas, this will be a very tough thing for republicans to get over. john heilemann, where is this going to fit in terms of what you write about all the time when you write your long pieces, books, for example? where is the development today in the fact that you now have an institutionalized tea party, that you have people wearing british red coat costumes basically, people from the inside joining the outside? what s this going t