For many years, David Yepsen was the go-to media expert on the Iowa caucuses from his post at the Des Moines Register. Yepsen isn't a reporter any more, just a pundit, but the media still follow his liberal conventional wisdom. On NPR.org, reporter Liz Halloran tried to paint the Tea Party movement into the usual crazy corner, and Yepsen insists this weekend was critical for the Tea Party movement's image -- as if every NPR and CNN isn't working to paint the crazy on it:
"This weekend will be critical for the Tea Party and conservatives," says David Yepsen of Southern Illinois University's Paul Simon Public Policy Institute.
As a questioner, along with George Stephanopoulos, of Republican presidential candidates at the Sunday debate in Iowa carried on ABC's This Week, veteran Des Moines Register political reporter and current columnist David Yepsen pressed the candidates to raise taxes. For the last question in the first hour of the 90 minute session from Drake University, Yepsen urged Mike Huckabee: “Is it time we raise the federal gas tax to start fixing up our nation's bridges and roads?” After Huckabee answered it was a matter of budget priorities, Yepsen turned to Rudy Giuliani: “In Minnesota, Governor Pawlenty, who vetoed an increase in his state gas tax, said now he may consider one. Is this Republican dogma against taxes now precluding the ability of you and your party to come up with the revenues that the country needs to fix its bridges?” Giuliani suggested Yepsen's formulation presumed a “Democratic liberal assumption: I need money, I raise taxes.”