A once-dismissed loose confederation of Tea Party activists opposed to big government, bailouts and higher taxes is causing heartburn for establishment candidates across the US.
They swept into Massachusetts with lightning speed when polls began to show that the eventual winner of last week’s special election, Republican Scott Brown, had a shot at upsetting Democrat Martha Coakley for the Senate seat that the late liberal lion, Edward Kennedy, held for almost 47 years.
Relying on Internet tools like Facebook and Twitter for communications, tea partiers have organized meetings, marches and protests almost overnight, often catching establishment politicians off guard. They had scheduled a rally at the Capitol just hours before President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech on Wednesday night to protest his healthcare plan.
Tea partiers boast that they are a leaderless, grassroots political army not beholden to either party, although some acknowledge that Republican candidates who share their conservative fiscal views are most likely to benefit from the movement’s efforts.
The movement takes its name from an event in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1773. Around 200 colonists, incensed that the English crown was demanding payment of duties on cargoes of tea in three British ships, stormed the ships in Boston Harbor and threw the boxes of tea overboard. The event, to protest what the colonists considered illegal taxation by the crown, came to be known to every American schoolchild as the Boston Tea Party.
The current Tea Party episodes reached Washington during the weekend. About 50 activists from 30 states gathered for a conference that former House of Representatives majority leader Dick Armey, a Republican, helped organize. Armey, a lobbyist until late last year, has made it clear he does not want to be the face of the movement.
Some of those attending were equally resolute that their marching orders will continue to come from among themselves, not political professionals in Washington.
“We get people who call us all the time, politicians or other organizations, and they say, ‘Hey, we need you to do a protest across the country on this date.’ And we just laugh because it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the movement,” said Mark Meckler, a California lawyer and board member of Tea Party Patriots, an umbrella group.
Tea parties began cropping up around the country in February last year, responding with anger to the government’s bailout of banks and insurance giant AIG, then Chrysler Group LLC and General Motors Corp. They then took on defeating Obama’s plans to overhaul the US healthcare system, showing up at and often disrupting lawmakers’ town hall meetings in August.
Democrats and a number of Republicans dismissed them as “Astroturf,” or fake grass roots: loud but ineffective. Few in either party now doubt the tea partiers’ legitimacy. And woe to Democrats and Republicans alike who do not recognize their power.
After winning the endorsement of national Republicans, Florida Governor Charlie Crist was once thought to be a shoo-in for the party’s nomination to take over the Senate seat vacated by Republican Mel Martinez.
Crist’s support for last year’s almost US$800 billion federal stimulus plan cost him support among conservatives, and he is now in a tight primary battle with a Tea Party-backed rival, former state House speaker Marco Rubio.
FreedomWorks has formed a Political Action Committee — a tactic to collect money for use in election campaigns — on behalf of several Tea Party groups for pouring money into a number of races. Besides helping Rubio, the committee is working to remove Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, and backs Republican Pat Toomey’s challenge to Republican-turned-Democratic Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania.
The movement’s far-flung nature has led to some growing pains and disagreements.
Demands for ideological purity from Tea Party activists forced a moderate Republican out of a special House race in New York last year, handing Democrat Bill Owens a seat the Republicans had held for decades.
The party “got this one wrong, plain and simple,” Mark Williams, a California radio host and head of the Tea Party Express, said at the time. “We have said all along that our fight was over principles, not party affiliation.”
Many activists have complaints about the so-called National Tea Party Convention scheduled next month, organized as a for-profit venture by Tennessee lawyer Judson Phillips. Balking at the US$550 ticket price and the US$100,000 speaking fee being paid to former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, some are boycotting it.
“We try to avoid these high-dollar price tags that you’re seeing. A lot of the blowback is simply that it’s expensive and real people can’t do that,” FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe said.
There also are disputes about whether social issues like abortion, gun rights and illegal immigration should be part of the movement’s agenda.
“That’s what’s a good thing about having separate groups,” said Lynn Brannon, a hospital worker and leader of the Delaware 9-12 Patriot Organization, a Tea Party group. “We decided as a group that we wanted to focus on immigration. We don’t want another organization to say, ‘You can’t get in on doing that.’”
Brannon’s group has worked to recruit a candidate to challenge Republican Representative Mike Castle, the leading candidate to win the Delaware Senate seat held for years by Vice President Joe Biden. Castle voted for a bill aimed at reducing global warming. Tea partiers view the legislation as a job-killing energy tax.
In many ways, the Tea Party movement mirrors the anti-tax insurgency of the early 1990s led by Texas billionaire Ross Perot.
Running for president as an independent in 1992 on a platform of balanced budgets and fiscal restraint, Perot captured 19 percent of the vote in an election in which Democrat Bill Clinton took the White House away from Republican President George H.W. Bush.
Sensing opportunity with Perot voters, Republicans at the time, led by party chairman Haley Barbour and Georgia representative Newt Gingrich, smartly coaxed them into the Republican Party. Republicans enacted the Contract With America, a 10-point plan that promised smaller government and lower taxes. The effort helped Republicans recapture both the House and Senate in the 1994 mid-term elections, which is not impossible again this year.
At Monday’s FreedomWorks briefing, tea partiers said they were readying a Contract “From” America that will be driven by local organizations.
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