Tea Partiers..... Can you hear us now?

Now that voter discontent has appeared in the bluest of blue states, and it's focused on the president's handling of terror, taxes, and health care, it's become much harder to marginalize Tea Party activists and other critics of the administration as:

"extremist mobs" by the Democratic National Committee, pawns of the insurance industry by Senator Dick Durbin, "un-American" by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, "brownshirts" by Representative Brian Baird of Washington, "manufactured" and "Astroturf" by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, "evilmongers" by Senator Harry Reid, accused of "fear-mongering" by the president, and been deemed "political terrorists" by Representative Baron Hill of Indiana.

It was always wishful thinking to believe that town hall protesters were a tiny segment of the country— all sound and fury signifying nothing. Even when it was a smaller group, their concerns were legitimate. It was disrespectful and dumb of Democrats to smear people giving voice to their worries, evincing the exact arrogance that turned voters in Massachusetts away from Martha Coakley.

As Brown's win showed, it signified something, indeed. Perhaps Coakley's loss would not have snuck up on national Democrats and Coakley herself if they hadn't spent the last year minimizing and denigrating administration critics. It's easy to think you've got an election in the bag when you assume your only opposition is a tiny clan of noisy, redneck racists (and, how many of those could there by in Massachusetts, anyway?).

It's easy to do a mediocre job selling one's sweeping health-care overhaul when you assume anyone against it just lives to hate poor people and/or do violence to President Obama.

Democrats fooled themselves into believing the town-hall/Tea Party caricature and ignored the feelings of real Americans.

And, to their electoral detriment, the media (particularly the MSNBC crew) abetted them in this fantasy. As of last night, the media have finally started to change their tune on the Tea Party movement. I was shocked to hear Chris Matthews concede that Democrats had not learned to talk to those critical of the administration, to assuage their worries. Perhaps that was partly because their picture of those critics was painted by...Chris Matthews, who called 60-something veterans "terrorists," and compared peaceful protesters to aspiring Timothy McVeighs. Maybe that had something to do with the lack of engagement.

David Gregory took the same turn as Matthews this morning, saying of Scott Brown's message, on "Morning Joe:"

"This is about incumbency and whether government's working for you...What Scott Brown spoke to is whether government is working. That's what really cuts through all this is whether government is working for the peple. That's what's fueling the Tea Party movement."

Oh, is that what's fueling the Tea Party movement? A benign and even noble critique of government as overreaching and irresponsible, and unresponsive to the real needs of citizens while it's indulging giant, ideological power grabs? I could have sworn it was racism.

Read more Mary Katherine Ham