The Dead Zone

Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal:

The political status quo, whatever good it did at times over the past 50 years, has arrived at a dead zone. The status quo—a vast, aging network of appropriators, Beltway enablers, bloodless public unions and private-sector pilot fish—budgeted the federal government, California, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Illinois and other states to the brink of effective bankruptcy.

The Obama administration is the dismaying, logical end-point of decades of public spending, a Gargantua that now threatens to smother everything else in the American economy. Velma Hart's confronting Barack Obama at that town-hall meeting Monday about the stalled economy—"I'm waiting, sir, I'm waiting"—may have been the central moment in what is happening now. It was the parable of the Emperor's New Clothes: He isn't wearing anything at all!

The torpid political world, the ancien regime, has put the nation at long-term risk. It is killing America's ability to revive from this punishing recession and compete with fast-running nations like China, India, Brazil and South Korea.

What the tea party and independent voters sympathetic to it are about is giving the United States the tools to compete again in the big global game. It starts with Stop-the-Spending. To the Democrats now demonizing the tea party and its candidates, those three words mean Armageddon, the end of their game.