Tea Partiers turn on each other
Pepe Silvia
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29744.html
Tea Partiers turn on each other
The movement's internal squabbling has some members fearful that it will disintegrate before realizing its full potential. Photo: AP
After emerging out of nowhere over the summer as a seemingly potent and growing political force, the tea party movement has become so rife with internal feuding over philosophy, strategy and money that some supporters fear it will disintegrate before realizing its full potential.
The grass-roots activists powering the movement have become increasingly divided on core questions such as whether to focus their efforts on shaping policy debates or elections, work on a local, regional, state or national level or closely align itself with the Republican Party, POLITICO found in interviews with tea party organizers in Washington and across the country.
Disagreements over those issues have spawned personal and institutional rivalries, at least one highly contentious lawsuit and — perhaps most significantly — resulted in the splintering of local, regional and national groups into a patchwork of hundreds of smaller groups that occasionally seem to be working at cross-purposes.
“These groups don’t play as well together as they should,” said Kevin Jackson, a St. Louis-based conservative author and activist who has spoken at dozens of tea party-type rallies and is traveling across the South with a convoy sponsored by the national Tea Party Patriots group.
“They’re fractured at the organization level, I think mainly because there are a lot of people who have not had managerial experience who all of a sudden are thrust into the limelight and become intoxicated with it. And when a potential rift comes up, instead of handling it and maybe agreeing to disagree, they splinter and go off on their own.”
The movement exploded onto the scene this year as a backlash to what participants contend are the free-spending, overreaching initiatives pushed by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress. It is composed of hundreds of independent local groups, many of which are incorporated as nonprofits, and have localized names referencing the tea parties, “9/12” or “We The People.”
Many of their members also belong to national conservative groups, including FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and Grassfire, while the local groups often affiliate formally or informally with loose-knit umbrella organizations, including the Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Nation.
The organizational chaos — combined with a widening apathy at the edges of the movement — has produced a growing consensus among local, state and national tea party leaders that in order for the movement to evolve from the loose conglomeration of fired-up activists who mobilized this summer to register their dissatisfaction with Obama and Congress at town hall protests and marches across the country into a sustainable block with the power to shape the GOP and swing elections, it will require the emergence of a national leader, group or structure.
Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, a nonprofit that has conducted organizer-training sessions for many tea party activists, said “the next 3 to 6 months” are going to be critical in determining “what’s going to happen with the tea party movement. Are they going to be a bunch of fingers, or are they going to come together to be a fist?”
Yet, while some tout a planned National Tea Party Convention in February (at which former Alaska governor and tea party darling Sarah Palin is listed as the keynote speaker) as a potentially unifying moment and others point to online coordination efforts, there is deep disagreement about what any national organization would look like and who would lead it.
FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, Grassfire, Americans for Limited Government and a host of other groups have helped organize various efforts capitalizing on the energy behind the tea parties, including providing training, online war rooms that help generate phone calls and ready-to-distribute canvassing literature.
But the groups have also jockeyed — mostly behind the scenes — to take credit for leadership of the movement, which — depending on who’s doing the telling — took its name either as an homage to the 1773 Boston tax revolt that played a major role in sparking the American Revolution or from an acronym standing for “Taxed Enough Already.”
The philosophical and strategic disagreements have been present within the tea party movement almost from the beginning. But they were hidden — or at least overshadowed — by the initial explosion of activist enthusiasm, which has dissipated somewhat, exposing and widening the rifts.
“Some of these groups may burn out, but this is part of this entrepreneurial process and the competition is good,” said Adam Brandon, vice president of communications for FreedomWorks, a nonprofit chaired by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas.
The group has facilitated some of the efforts demonstrating the potential power of the movement. Those have included the confrontations that erupted at congressional town halls this summer, the massive Sept. 12 “Taxpayer March on Washington” as well as another Washington rally this month and support for conservative third-party candidate Doug Hoffman, who narrowly lost a special congressional election in upstate New York this month despite strong support from many tea party groups and leaders.
Brandon stressed that the strength of the tea party movement is in its grass-roots nature and that FreedomWorks’s goal is to help facilitate the movement, not to control it.
“One thing that’s clear is that anyone who says they own the tea party movement is going to get run over because no one owns the movement,” he said.
Brandon acknowledged the “rivalries and turf battles” now gripping parts of the movement but said “that’s normal because people have different ideas about what they want. That’s what’s happening now, and it’s sometimes a painful process.”
Those fights have been waged over issues that go to the heart of the movement’s purpose and strategy as well as more mundane rivalries and personal feuds.
In Myrtle Beach, S.C., disputes within the local tea party about how much to engage in partisan politics and whether board members were profiting from contracts to print paraphernalia emblazoned with the group’s logo prompted the treasurer to resign and join with defectors from a North Carolina “We the People” group to form a new organization.
“There’s a lot of fighting, and everyone wants to be in charge, and that’s why you have so many splinter groups,” said the ex-treasurer Janet Spencer, who charged her adversaries within the tea party with saying “derogatory things about me that were very unprofessional.”
She said her new group, called Patriotic Voices of America/Carolina Patriots, counts about 100 members and will not coordinate with the Myrtle Beach Tea Party, whose treasurer, David Ognek, said the friction is “just group dynamics.”
In Texas, a handful of thriving tea party groups severed their ties from the national Tea Party Patriots group after it ousted, then sued a founding board member who had affiliated with a rival group called the Tea Party Express.
"Our fight is in Congress and not with each other or with these other groups,” said Toby Marie Walker, who was the Texas state coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots and also co-founded the Waco, Texas, tea party.
This Waco group recently drew an estimated 4,000 people to a rally it organized with the Tea Party Express, which travels the country hosting rallies. The month before, it had pulled out of the Tea Party Patriots after the Patriots group accused the Tea Party Express of steering the movement away from nonpartisan issue-based advocacy, embracing extremist rhetoric, and raising questions about the Express’s finances.
The Patriots’ attack and lawsuit worried the Waco group’s board, Walker said, because “if you align yourself with someone who is going to be that malicious, then how do we know they won’t turn on us?”
Other local tea party groups, though, cast their lots with the Patriots, heeding the group’s call to disassociate with the Tea Party Express.
In Granbury, Texas, local tea party organizer Josh Sullivan says he believes the movement’s effectiveness is being compromised by extremism.“You have some interesting folks in the Tea Party movement — some of them I can support, but some of them are kind of out there and radical, and I don’t want to associate myself with them,” he said.
In Northern Colorado, meanwhile, a handful of active 9/12 groups — named for the Glenn Beck-encouraged effort to stage the Sept. 12 Washington march — are unhappy with the state 9/12 group’s aversion to fundraising and with its focus on national issues and have discussed forming their own rival statewide group.
“People are beginning to become a little bit de-energized — they’re starting to feel like they’re fighting a losing battle, because we send a lot of letters into Washington, D.C., and things like that, and people are saying they’re not listening,” said Brian Britton, who heads the Greeley, Colo., 9/12 group.
That fear is echoed by Glenn Galls, a Hot Springs, Ark., tea party organizer frustrated with the focus of Arkansas’ state-level tea party groups on national races and issues such as cap and trade and health care.
“If the tea party movement is going to continue to thrive and to grow and to have influence,” he said, “it must start coming together and coalescing and finding its purpose in life, because if it doesn’t, the excitement will fade like it does from anything else.”
Tea Partiers turn on each other
The movement's internal squabbling has some members fearful that it will disintegrate before realizing its full potential. Photo: AP
After emerging out of nowhere over the summer as a seemingly potent and growing political force, the tea party movement has become so rife with internal feuding over philosophy, strategy and money that some supporters fear it will disintegrate before realizing its full potential.
The grass-roots activists powering the movement have become increasingly divided on core questions such as whether to focus their efforts on shaping policy debates or elections, work on a local, regional, state or national level or closely align itself with the Republican Party, POLITICO found in interviews with tea party organizers in Washington and across the country.
Disagreements over those issues have spawned personal and institutional rivalries, at least one highly contentious lawsuit and — perhaps most significantly — resulted in the splintering of local, regional and national groups into a patchwork of hundreds of smaller groups that occasionally seem to be working at cross-purposes.
“These groups don’t play as well together as they should,” said Kevin Jackson, a St. Louis-based conservative author and activist who has spoken at dozens of tea party-type rallies and is traveling across the South with a convoy sponsored by the national Tea Party Patriots group.
“They’re fractured at the organization level, I think mainly because there are a lot of people who have not had managerial experience who all of a sudden are thrust into the limelight and become intoxicated with it. And when a potential rift comes up, instead of handling it and maybe agreeing to disagree, they splinter and go off on their own.”
The movement exploded onto the scene this year as a backlash to what participants contend are the free-spending, overreaching initiatives pushed by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress. It is composed of hundreds of independent local groups, many of which are incorporated as nonprofits, and have localized names referencing the tea parties, “9/12” or “We The People.”
Many of their members also belong to national conservative groups, including FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity and Grassfire, while the local groups often affiliate formally or informally with loose-knit umbrella organizations, including the Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Nation.
The organizational chaos — combined with a widening apathy at the edges of the movement — has produced a growing consensus among local, state and national tea party leaders that in order for the movement to evolve from the loose conglomeration of fired-up activists who mobilized this summer to register their dissatisfaction with Obama and Congress at town hall protests and marches across the country into a sustainable block with the power to shape the GOP and swing elections, it will require the emergence of a national leader, group or structure.
Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, a nonprofit that has conducted organizer-training sessions for many tea party activists, said “the next 3 to 6 months” are going to be critical in determining “what’s going to happen with the tea party movement. Are they going to be a bunch of fingers, or are they going to come together to be a fist?”
Yet, while some tout a planned National Tea Party Convention in February (at which former Alaska governor and tea party darling Sarah Palin is listed as the keynote speaker) as a potentially unifying moment and others point to online coordination efforts, there is deep disagreement about what any national organization would look like and who would lead it.
FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, Grassfire, Americans for Limited Government and a host of other groups have helped organize various efforts capitalizing on the energy behind the tea parties, including providing training, online war rooms that help generate phone calls and ready-to-distribute canvassing literature.
But the groups have also jockeyed — mostly behind the scenes — to take credit for leadership of the movement, which — depending on who’s doing the telling — took its name either as an homage to the 1773 Boston tax revolt that played a major role in sparking the American Revolution or from an acronym standing for “Taxed Enough Already.”
The philosophical and strategic disagreements have been present within the tea party movement almost from the beginning. But they were hidden — or at least overshadowed — by the initial explosion of activist enthusiasm, which has dissipated somewhat, exposing and widening the rifts.
“Some of these groups may burn out, but this is part of this entrepreneurial process and the competition is good,” said Adam Brandon, vice president of communications for FreedomWorks, a nonprofit chaired by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas.
The group has facilitated some of the efforts demonstrating the potential power of the movement. Those have included the confrontations that erupted at congressional town halls this summer, the massive Sept. 12 “Taxpayer March on Washington” as well as another Washington rally this month and support for conservative third-party candidate Doug Hoffman, who narrowly lost a special congressional election in upstate New York this month despite strong support from many tea party groups and leaders.
Brandon stressed that the strength of the tea party movement is in its grass-roots nature and that FreedomWorks’s goal is to help facilitate the movement, not to control it.
“One thing that’s clear is that anyone who says they own the tea party movement is going to get run over because no one owns the movement,” he said.
Brandon acknowledged the “rivalries and turf battles” now gripping parts of the movement but said “that’s normal because people have different ideas about what they want. That’s what’s happening now, and it’s sometimes a painful process.”
Those fights have been waged over issues that go to the heart of the movement’s purpose and strategy as well as more mundane rivalries and personal feuds.
In Myrtle Beach, S.C., disputes within the local tea party about how much to engage in partisan politics and whether board members were profiting from contracts to print paraphernalia emblazoned with the group’s logo prompted the treasurer to resign and join with defectors from a North Carolina “We the People” group to form a new organization.
“There’s a lot of fighting, and everyone wants to be in charge, and that’s why you have so many splinter groups,” said the ex-treasurer Janet Spencer, who charged her adversaries within the tea party with saying “derogatory things about me that were very unprofessional.”
She said her new group, called Patriotic Voices of America/Carolina Patriots, counts about 100 members and will not coordinate with the Myrtle Beach Tea Party, whose treasurer, David Ognek, said the friction is “just group dynamics.”
In Texas, a handful of thriving tea party groups severed their ties from the national Tea Party Patriots group after it ousted, then sued a founding board member who had affiliated with a rival group called the Tea Party Express.
"Our fight is in Congress and not with each other or with these other groups,” said Toby Marie Walker, who was the Texas state coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots and also co-founded the Waco, Texas, tea party.
This Waco group recently drew an estimated 4,000 people to a rally it organized with the Tea Party Express, which travels the country hosting rallies. The month before, it had pulled out of the Tea Party Patriots after the Patriots group accused the Tea Party Express of steering the movement away from nonpartisan issue-based advocacy, embracing extremist rhetoric, and raising questions about the Express’s finances.
The Patriots’ attack and lawsuit worried the Waco group’s board, Walker said, because “if you align yourself with someone who is going to be that malicious, then how do we know they won’t turn on us?”
Other local tea party groups, though, cast their lots with the Patriots, heeding the group’s call to disassociate with the Tea Party Express.
In Granbury, Texas, local tea party organizer Josh Sullivan says he believes the movement’s effectiveness is being compromised by extremism.“You have some interesting folks in the Tea Party movement — some of them I can support, but some of them are kind of out there and radical, and I don’t want to associate myself with them,” he said.
In Northern Colorado, meanwhile, a handful of active 9/12 groups — named for the Glenn Beck-encouraged effort to stage the Sept. 12 Washington march — are unhappy with the state 9/12 group’s aversion to fundraising and with its focus on national issues and have discussed forming their own rival statewide group.
“People are beginning to become a little bit de-energized — they’re starting to feel like they’re fighting a losing battle, because we send a lot of letters into Washington, D.C., and things like that, and people are saying they’re not listening,” said Brian Britton, who heads the Greeley, Colo., 9/12 group.
That fear is echoed by Glenn Galls, a Hot Springs, Ark., tea party organizer frustrated with the focus of Arkansas’ state-level tea party groups on national races and issues such as cap and trade and health care.
“If the tea party movement is going to continue to thrive and to grow and to have influence,” he said, “it must start coming together and coalescing and finding its purpose in life, because if it doesn’t, the excitement will fade like it does from anything else.”
don't compete; coexist
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
what are you but my reflection? who am i to judge or strike you down?
"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama
when you told me 'if you can't beat 'em, join 'em'
i was thinkin 'death before dishonor'
Post edited by Unknown User on
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Comments
The article references the different personalities and the growing apathy, but I'm sure there are other issues. Everyone can agree on three word slogans and railing against big government, but good luck getting these people to agree on specifics.
Lower taxes? YES!
Socialism bad? YES!
Cut governement spending? YES!
What do we cut? Now the fun begins - everyone wants spending cut, but can't agree on where...
Do we cut medicare? "No, my medicines are too expensive..."
Do we cut education? "No, my kid's school is falling apart..."
Do we cut farm subsidies? "No, my brother's farm is getting foreclosed on because of the bad crop year"
Do we cut from the transportation money? "Well, then state and local taxes are going to have to increase to cover it"
Do we cut defense spending? "Hell no! Go USA!"
The right got these people worked up into a lather about crap, and now they have to figure out how to control them.
And about the apathy, crying wolf over and over again works for the talk radio, affirmation needing people, but after hearing over and over again about how the country is being destroyed, starts to fall on deaf ears for the general public when their lives pretty much go on unchanged and unaffected after a while.
was like a picture
of a sunny day
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”
― Abraham Lincoln
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
Hail, Hail!!!
thats not fair, i know some people who believe in what the Tea Partiers believe in and they hate Fox news.
how is that not fair when many of these groups have taken their marching orders directly from fox news? there are exceptions to every statement, and to me it seems that your friends are the exception and not the norm.
"Well, you tell him that I don't talk to suckas."
what they really need is a careless remark by obama or him to hire a new staffer they can complain about. you can only rant so long before you kinda lose that outraged zeal and since none of them have any coherent plan to solve the country's problems they're dependent on someone else fucking up to keep their rage boiling. becos god knows they're not going to rally around a good idea anytime soon...
You're correct... it wasn't fair on my part and i apologise.
So, even though it was originally made in jest... I will rephrase it:
'FOX News just needs to do a better job advertising and sponsoring their events around more specific issues'.
Hail, Hail!!!
his orginal post seemed to suggest that all these tea party people are some brain washed and dumb. that is not true. just like not everyone who likes what Obama is doing are not brainwashed from MSNBC.
no need to say sorry, i was just having a bad day. i agree with you tho.