Hold the milk, add sugar, it’s a Tea Party

A new fault line is dividing American society. What identities now stand opposed to each other?

Some people favor parental choice and others the health of American children.

This, at least, is the story the Tea Party is spreading and hoping Americans will buy into before the 2012 elections.

If Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn., and her Alaskan counterpart have their way, public opinion will accept that we must align ourselves with one position or the other.

On one side, parents who deny their children dessert line up with breastfeeding advocates. Standing opposed to them, parents who lovingly gratify their children’s sweet tooth and certainly don’t want the government to award mothers tax breaks for the cost of breast pumps.

But is there any basis for believing such an opposition is legitimate?

Considering several facts would suggest not.

It’s not at all insignificant that the figure being targeted by Bachmann is Michelle Obama. One gets the sense that Tea Party leaders are grasping frantically for any opportunity to wound the first lady’s popularity.

The former Alaskan governor’s political opportunism cannot be concealed here.

She trivialized Obama’s eat healthy initiative in a segment of her show taped last summer, telling her children that she’d magnanimously allow them to eat dessert, a privilege they presumably wouldn’t enjoy if Obama was in charge of their meals.

The ex-office holder was also caught in a Pennsylvania school last fall delivering cookies and ironically saying, “Who should be deciding what I eat? Should it be government or should it be parents? It should be the parents.”

I hadn’t been aware any of the Palin children attended a Pennsylvania school.

When the first lady set out to help children live healthier lives, the Tea Party had to resort to exaggerated and inapplicable language about freedom and choice.  

Providing exclusively fattening foods in a school cafeteria gives parents no more choice about what their children eat than asking kids to choose between multiple healthy options.

And it’s not particularly clear how Palin squares her attack on breastfeeding pump tax deductibles with the language of individual choice and lower taxes she invokes against the proposition.

Admittedly, this item-specific tax deductible doesn’t represent the sort of sweeping tax repeals the Tea Party would like to see.

But it’s hard to argue, as the former Alaskan governor did on Laura Ingraham’s radio talk show, that we will have a “nanny state” if women don’t pay tax on the income they use to buy breastfeeding equipment.

Food shouldn’t be a polarizing issue. While it’s true unhealthy eating habits vary demographically, it’s not at all the case that eating bad food is an issue of cultural identity.

All too often, the decision to eat processed, high-fat foods is no choice at all, but the only economically plausible way for low-income families to fill their children’s stomachs.

And that is precisely the reason the Tea Party can’t build a sensible argument against the first lady’s work to make healthy eating more affordable.  

Ideological consistency would oblige them to support an initiative that gives Americans more and better choices.


E-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu