Chapter 2: Truly Organizing for America
As part of my TEA Party +15 celebration I am serializing my 2019 book The Rise and Fall of the TEA Party. A chapter will appear each Tuesday until the 15th anniversary on February 27, 2024.
“I gather I'm the father of the Tea Party.” - Barack Obama in his farewell address, January 10, 2017.
It's likely that fewer than 100,000 Americans were watching CNBC's Squawk Box when Rick Santelli called for his tea party along the shores of Lake Michigan, and many among them drinking their morning coffee probably didn't begin to pay attention until the traders in the background reacted as strongly as they did. By the time the business day ended, though, millions had heard about what went on that morning as the word about “Santelli's Rant” spread on the World Wide Web. Much of that internet audience applauded the honesty in Santelli's remarks and expressed their agreement with his sentiment, but there were a fair number around the nation who went further, taking the TEA Party idea Santelli promoted and running with it.
A common perception – one that's become common because there's a grain of truth to it – is that government works slowly because they have to go through a plethora of steps and labyrinth of bureaucracy in order to get things done. Just ask yourself how long it takes them to patch up a pothole on your street, for example, then imagine it magnified to a scale of thousands as the federal government tries to solve problems America's (and sometimes the world's) citizens claim to be victimized by.
In this grand scheme of government, preservation of one's livelihood seems to be Job One so things which deviate from that scheme don't become priority items. And that creates a paradox: every problem government solves obviates the need for the department, bureau, or administration put in place to take care of it, so you get such phenomena as “mission creep” in order for the Gordian knot of bureaucracy to remain tied. Thus, the ship of state doesn't change course readily and those steering it try to avoid these corrections as best they can.
On the other hand, look at the private sector and the power of motivation for a cause. In this particular case, February hadn't come to a close yet when the first post-Santelli TEA Parties were put into the annals of history. In just a few days organizers turned their protest plans into action and drew sizable crowds in a number of major cities. Granted, anyone can plan a protest march or gathering at any time, but having the sore subjects of a stalled economy and a government seemingly clueless about the correct methods to address the problem meant the turnout was bound to be more than just the usual activists, complainers, and cranks. Nor did it hurt to have an alternative media looking for newsworthy items; an outlet organizers employed to fantastic effect.
Among the first organizers of the protests which became the template for a local TEA Party were two people who didn't fit the standard image eventually created by the media. To the mainstream press locked in their Washington-New York axis worldview, the picture of the average TEA Party event organizer came to be one of a middle-aged pot-bellied white male; a hayseed, rural redneck blue collar working man with a gun rack in the crew cab of his pickup truck. This composite organizer's protest wasn't over government, but in the minds of the media was rooted instead in the racism of opposing our newly-elected first black president. In reality, though, these two women who organized these precursor events to the TEA Party were more like the rest of us: one squarely from the Baby Boom generation and the other born at the tail end of Generation X. Working independently of each other on opposite sides of the country, their one piece of commonality was a distrust of the direction this nation was being led in.
Our first organizer was modest in her goals. Florida transplant Mary Rakovich was a furloughed engineer who had moved south from Michigan with her husband to take care of her family. Fresh off a FreedomWorks training session she had completed mere weeks before, she found out President Obama was coming to her part of Florida to promote the stimulus on February 10, 2009. Rakovich took action by organizing a small protest – small, but vocal enough to land her on Fox News that evening. Seventeen days later, she assisted with the first group of TEA Parties and continued to grow her group as the months went on.1
Out on the Left Coast, Keri Carender was an Oxford-educated housewife and mother who spent her spare time as a blogger who went by the pseudonym “Liberty Belle.” Carender had already contemplated ways to gather conservatives in her area together2 and just days prior to “Santelli's Rant” had organized a rally near her Seattle home against the “Porkulus” bill. While the pet name created by Rush Limbaugh for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was cute, in truth ARRA turned out to be yet another misguided attempt to stem the economic bleeding. And while Keri was pessimistic about her chances of success in stopping the bill, she felt she had to start the ball rolling:
Make no mistake, the President will be signing that bill tomorrow, I have no illusions that he will actually listen to us. BUT, maybe, just maybe we can start a movement that will snowball across the nation and get people out of their homes, meeting each other and working together to redirect this country towards its truly radical founding principles of individual liberty and freedom. Maybe people will wake up slowly at first, and then quickly when they realize the urgency needed.3
Needless to say, the newfound attention to the limited-government cause spurred Carender to redouble her efforts: she was another organizer in the first TEA Party wave that occurred eight days after Santelli's broadcast.
But Rakovich and Carender was far from alone. In the days leading up to and immediately following the signing of the ARRA, there were other protests against its effects in Denver, Fort Myers, Florida, and Mesa, Arizona – the latter two coordinated to occur during an Obama visit to promote the stimulus bill. Rakovich traveled across the country to participate in the Arizona protest as a show of support.
All these individuals and groups seized on an undercurrent of political pressure which had began to form even before the 2008 election was completed. Because Ron Paul had done so well with the Boston Tea Party theme, there were already a number of like-minded groups kicking the idea around. In New York state, a January, 2009 protest against a soda tax saw a local Young Americans for Liberty chapter dump soda into the Susquehanna River as their preferred means of protest.4 (YAL was the successor to the various student groups promoting Paul's 2008 presidential campaign.) A few weeks later, independently of each other as well as the eventual TEA Party, both part-time stock trader Graham Makohoniuk and investment website operator Karl Denninger renewed the old idea5 of mailing tea bags to Congress.6 Stephanie Jasky, a frustrated Michigan paralegal and reader of Denninger's website, ran with that thought7 by sending a tea bag to all 535 members. (That symbolism may have influenced Santelli a few weeks later as several of the Chicago Mercantile traders who were members of these various groups had tea bags adorning their workspaces.)8 9
Nor did it hurt the cause when nationally-known conservative blogger and journalist Michelle Malkin became a key cheerleader for the early events spotlighting opposition to the stimulus bill, writing on the first modest protest by Mary Rakovich in Ft. Myers, Florida10 (as noted, a counter to an Obama rally)11 as well as the subsequent gathering of opponents organized by Keri Carender in Seattle.12 That event was held on February 16, three days before Santelli's remarks and the day before the ARRA was, as Carender predicted, signed by President Obama. Subsequent events were held in Malkin's hometown of Denver the next day13 and in response to another Obama appearance14 on February 18 in Mesa, Arizona.15
Malkin did her part in promoting the first wave of TEA Parties, but there was plenty of behind-the-scenes action that only came out later. A “Time Line”16 of the TEA Party pointed out that the idea was already in place in Chicago before Santelli spoke out at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange: the Illinois Libertarian Party had only a week before set up a “Tea Party Chicago” Facebook page, presumably to carry out the idea they'd spent months discussing internally as their own.17 Yet it's likely that, had Santelli never spoken out, the Illinois Libertarian event would have been all but forgotten by now, just as the earlier Tea Party-style events which drew very little attention outside their local area were. (Nor would there be the need for this book.)
But in less than 48 hours post-Santelli, there were several competing websites and groups trying to organize more stimulus protests – opposition that could now be packaged under a TEA Party banner.
Among the first was #TCOT organizer Michael Patrick Leahy, who quickly amassed several like-minded organizations that would later evolve into key segments of one of the first organized TEA Party umbrella groups. In a blog post (which likely was his press release as well) Leahy wrote on the afternoon of February 20:
Online conservative activists have rallied to CNBC’s Rick Santelli’s call yesterday, backed by mortgage traders, for a “Nationwide Chicago Tea Party” to protest the Obama Administration’s bailout plan.
Moving quickly, Top Conservatives on Twitter, Smart Girl Politics, the #Dontgo movement, Americans for Tax Reform, the Heartland Institute, and (The) American Spectator Magazine joined forces to announce a “Nationwide Chicago Tea Party,” to be held on Friday, February 27 at noon EST.
The tea party will be held simultaneously in Chicago, Washington DC, at dozens of locations around the US, and on Twitter, using the #teaparty hashtag.
Santelli’s criticism of the Obama mortgage plan is that it rewards the irresponsible, while penalizing the responsible.
As co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter, I believe it is very important that all conservatives move quickly and in collaboration to hold this event. In today’s world, the life cycle of political events moves very rapidly. There’s momentum out there surrounding Santelli’s call to protest yet another ill-advised bailout of yet another group that has made bad decisions.18
In a related move, the NationwideChicagoTeaParty.com domain19 was registered on February 21 by Eric Odom, a Chicago-based libertarian online activist who the summer before had spearheaded the Twitter hashtag campaign called #Dontgo (which Leahy referred to in his release) urging Congress to stay and deal with high gasoline prices by eliminating restrictions on oil exploration.
On a separate front, the TaxpayerTEAParty.com domain was quickly registered by Americans for Prosperity,20 a group that was rooted in a predecessor free-market advocacy group called Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). In 2004 CSE and its affiliated foundation split into two groups, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and FreedomWorks.21 Both AFP and FreedomWorks were strong initial backers of the TEA Party movement, as this book will eventually detail.
In this post-rant landscape, almost overnight TEA Parties and other similar rallies sprang up like dandelions in an unattended grassy lot. Malkin had a list of over 30 events that were held,22 with some sponsored by advocacy groups like AFP that would eventually attempt to amplify their own political power through the movement, but most brought on by local groups that quickly formed under the TEA Party banner. For example, take the case of Tea Party Patriots co-founder Mark Meckler, who later detailed how he put together the rally in Sacramento:
I discussed the idea with my wife. “Let's hold a tea party in Sacramento, at the state capitol,” I told her. I asked her to watch the Santelli video and showed her a few “tea party” Facebook pages, and she was hooked. I did the same with my retired parents, and they became hooked too. It would be a family affair.
We started a Facebook page of our own for the Sacramento Tea Party and invited the few people I knew online. I started networking on the Web, calling local media, and doing everything I could think of, as an “activist” with no experience or training, to get the word out. We had no idea what would happen, and no idea if it would be just my family attending. But we were all in, going so far as to take the kids out of school to show them the First Amendment in action. If that had been it, we would have considered the event a success.
On February 27, 2009, with about twenty handmade signs in the back of our SUV, we drove down to Sacramento from the Sierra foothills. We were excited and nervous. We'd never protested or done anything like this before. We'd certainly never “organized” politically, and we had no idea what to expect. Would anyone show? Would people abuse us verbally or even physically? We were without reference points, conservative Americans embarking on a new frontier: political activism.23
Down the coast, Los Angeles TEA Party leader Gary Aminoff worked with several others, including local radio host Tony Katz, to put together an event on the Santa Monica Pier. “We had a huge crowd come out,” said Gary. Aminoff also took up the cause immediately after Santelli's rant, although as a leader in the ill-fated McCain campaign in California he was already “very upset” with Obama's policies.24
Across the country, in the hipster paradise of Asheville, North Carolina, there was a smaller gathering of about 40 who turned out in the rain. “The mood was very positive and many expressed enthusiasm over the potential for a repeat performance on a sunny weekend day in the near future,” wrote Asheville organizer Erika Franzi under her nom de plume “Jane Q. Republican.”25 (Perhaps in a foreshadowing of events to come, the local GOP was a presence: Franzi noted that they provided those who gathered with pulled pork sandwiches and sweet tea.)
While a lot of TEA Party organizers, like Meckler, were new to the game, there were others who were old hands at this type of activity. Joan Fabiano, who put together a rally at the Michigan state capitol in Lansing, was a self-described “activist” herself who had put together a successful Glenn Beck-inspired “Rally for America” a few years earlier. Not only was she an early Twitter convert, but Joan was also active at the Free Republic website which dated from the mid-1990s.26 In short, the TEA Party was custom-made for her skill set.
Not all the TEA Party events were as wildly successful as those Meckler, Aminoff, and Fabiano spearheaded thanks to weather like Asheville's, permitting issues, and the fact many were held on a weekday when people desperate to keep their jobs were working; despite those drawbacks the protests as a whole drew thousands of ordinary people who were frustrated by government overreaction and incompetence when it came to addressing the Great Recession.
One of those most frustrated was Eric Eisenhammer, who was already part of the anti-tax movement as grassroots director of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association in California. As a co-organizer in Sacramento, Eric described his initial impetus to join up:
I saw Rick Santelli's remarks on Fox News (after they originally aired on CNBC) and how huge Tea Party rallies spontaneously broke out across the country. My grandpa watched the countercultural protests of the 1960's and never got involved because he thought they were crazy and would therefore never actually gain power. By my lifetime they had gained power and control of much of the media, academia and government. I was inspired to see conservatives finally taking a stand.
(…)
More than anything I felt that our country was being run by a liberal elite that not only didn't listen to mainstream America but held us in contempt. Their out of control spending, in my view, is driven by their belief that they have a right to behave with impunity because they are above us.27
The interesting thing about what organizers dubbed the “Chicago Tea Parties” in a nod to Santelli is that these are the among the first nationwide protests done in the age of unfiltered coverage, with self-styled journalists doing on-the-spot reporting.28 So while the quality of the audio and video may not have been professional-grade, the message portrayed by these amateur journalists was more sympathetic to the aims of the organizers of these events than most of the slickly-packaged segments than those local news stations which grudgingly bothered to come out and cover the dissent put on the air.
So all that on-the-spot coverage came without the filter of the mainstream media and its seeming blind support for Barack Obama, meaning we could see a number of common threads running through this initial group of protests, whether held in the pouring rain of Atlanta, the chilly snow flurries of Chicago, or just the dreary weather common in late February around the nation.
One was the frustration with an unresponsive government that seemed to have the one-track mind of spending the money our grandchildren haven't even made yet – however, the $10 trillion in debt several speakers cited now sounds quaint years later when our national debt is well more than double that. This concern with government spending led to a shared belief among those gathered around the country that what took 220 years to build was being destroyed in one month. Statements like theirs, though, oversimplified the issue and put a lot more blame on President Obama than they should have, given the previous President also tried the idea of handing out government dollars to goose the economy. However, in President Bush's defense, his initial version of stimulus was more of an advance to taxpayers on money the recipients were due to get a couple months later anyway.
When compared to the Bush approach, though, it was clear that in its first few weeks the Obama administration was going full-tilt Keynesian on America, and the $75 billion Homeowner Stability Initiative29 that led Santelli to speak out, piled on top of the $800 billion-plus ARRA stimulus package that had been signed two days prior to his remarks,30 added fuel to the firestorm of resentment. “Your mortgage is not our problem,” read one protestor's sign. What proponents of the stimulus considered as a hand up was, to those opposed to “porkulus,” just another big-government handout. When it came to shoveling taxpayer money at our basket full of economic problems, those who attended the TEA Parties felt enough was enough.
Second was the unified opposition to the idea of bailing out private-sector companies and industries considered “too big to fail” while small businesses were being crushed by the economic downturn. Unlike Wall Street, General Motors, and Chrysler, mom-and-pop shops with nowhere near enough clout and capital to be able to influence policy were going bankrupt. Those small businesses, which combined added up to millions of productive, dedicated workers – even more so than the big boys had – didn't enjoy any prospect of the degree of government assistance taxpayers ponied up to keep the largest entities afloat. There's no way of knowing just how many of those attending these rallies had the time to spare because they were thrown out of work thanks to the oft-repeated scene of a factory or office full of workers getting a collective pink slip as their employer closed up shop, but it's safe to bet a lot of them were looking to the TEA Party movement to bring the change needed in order for them to get hired somewhere else. So there was a certain sense of desperation present at these events.
Part of that desperation came from a third factor: the notion that neither major party really was all that interested in restoring the idea of fiscal responsibility and implementing the pullback of federal government intervention required to hasten the necessary recovery and to allow the market to correct itself. There was already a latent cynicism out there among the disaffected, including Meckler:
As I followed political news, over the years I noted that something strange happened to politicians after they got elected. Not only did they forget about the people who sent them to Washington, they also seemed to forget about the principles that built this nation, and the oath they swore to uphold those principles. Republican or Democrat – it did not seem to matter which side was in power. Either way our government kept getting bigger, our liberties kept getting smaller, and our nation kept moving away from the ideas that made it great. The speed with which we drifted away from the founding principles ebbed and flowed, but the direction never seemed to change.31
Another common lament at these first TEA Parties was that Democrats, led by Obama, were in the process of fundamentally transforming the nation, and it seemed like the GOP was only acting as token opposition while this was going on. “The Republican Party is gone!” shouted one protester in Chicago, and many in the initial wave of protestors believed that a third party, perhaps one that stood for a more conservative fiscal policy and consumption-based taxation system, was the way to go.
Yet there wasn't the complete partisanship at this first wave of TEA Parties that we had seen at typical political rallies, as several speakers gave credit to the more centrist “Blue Dog” Democrats for standing up to their leadership against the fiscal onslaught of red ink, and chastised Republicans for a lack of spine. In Chicago, organizer Eric Odom rebuffed the request of RNC Chair Michael Steele to speak to the event, telling Steele, “Thanks but no thanks. You're welcome to come and listen,” said Odom. “But we're not interested in hearing you speak. Frankly, you need to understand what we're telling you because so far, we don't think you do.”32
Those attending the initial TEA Party events also held a lot of suspicion for the mainstream national media, which they accused of being lapdogs for the new Obama administration. (Only Fox News was spared from their wrath.) Their interest extended to how these individual events were covered by the media, recording and sharing the (mostly local) news coverage of their events just as the Santelli rant eventually spread like wildfire. As noted above, these non-traditional scribes also logged their reports on the World Wide Web, eventually being linked and publicized through more established outlets and bloggers like the aforementioned Michelle Malkin, as well as Pajamas Media and RedState, to name a few.
But if you looked past the generally handmade signs with their pleas for fiscal responsibility from the federal government and the yellow Gadsden flags which eventually became the symbol of the TEA Party, you found everyday people who were stirred to action as never before. “I've never protested in my life, but I am taking a stand,” said Susan Brubaker, a Kansas protester interviewed on her local news.33 And while the gatherings were fairly modest, those attending were eager to learn and listen: they signed up for e-mail lists, were alerted to the websites of various advocacy groups both existing and new (AFP and FreedomWorks were joined as key sponsors of some of the earliest events by recent online startups Smart Girl Politics and eventually the nascent Nationwide TEA Party Coalition) and encouraged to continue the fight. “We need to make this our new hobby,” said Dallas TEA Party co-organizer and speaker Ken Emanuelson.34 “Every one of us needs to decide that this trumps just about everything else.” And while he went on to say that the subject of Washington fiscal responsibility was boring and dry, Emanuelson had the correct idea this would be an extended fight.
On her blog, Fabiano described part of her experience with the event in Lansing, which attracted over 300 people: “You could feel the energy in the air. The camaraderie of being gathered together with like-minded citizens caused most to linger even after our program was over, discussing politics and our new movement. And myself and my fellow co-organizers were thanked over and over again.”35
Indeed, thousands of people were truly being organized for action. Bolstered by the success of the first initial wave of TEA Parties, a group of protests originally intended to be a one-time series of events instead spawned hundreds more. These new organizers joined the fold over the next few weeks and set their sights on a second set of nationwide rallies to be held on Tax Day, April 15.
Looking back at that interim period when the April events were being planned, TEA Party organizers Jenny Beth Martin and Mark Meckler explained their approach.
So how did we grow from twenty-two people to 1.2 million people in less than two months?
We did not fully realize it at the time, but we were organizing the Tea Party movement along the lines of an open-source community. In the world of computer software, open-source communities develop and improve ideas organically, based on concepts and practices that work.
(…)
(Open-source) provides the fastest possible rate of improvement for ideas, and in the case of the Tea Party movement, this notion was fundamental in the development of a true political revolution. (Italics in original.)36
At the same time, though, the grassroots sponsors that promoted the original set of TEA Parties and had formed the Nationwide TEA Party Coalition were joined by two others with more star power. Newt Gingrich and his American Solutions organization began their “partnering” with the Nationwide Tax Day TEA Party group to promote these events in mid-March. “I believe that April 15 is a great day to remember historically that Americans have stood up against bad government, they've stood up against high taxes, and in our generation we can get back to creating jobs by doing just the same,” said Gingrich in a promotional video.37
That's not to say, though, that Gingrich's entry wasn't viewed as a double-edged sword by organizers like Leahy:
A week after the success of the Nationwide Chicago Tea Party...I received a private direct message on Twitter from Newt Gingrich. Would we, he asked, be interested in having his American Solutions group join the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition… as the fourth sponsor of the Tax Day Tea Party?
If Gingrich's group was added as a sponsor, it would add jet fuel to the movement. So far we were perceived as a group of activists on the margin, even though our message of the limited government ethos reflected the views of the majority of the American people. With the former Speaker of the House would come increased media visibility, and inevitably interest from Fox News, where he was a featured contributor. But Gingrich's record was viewed by many as questionable. He had been an able articulator of the limited-government ethos when he championed the Contract with America, which had propelled him to the speakership in 1994 during the Clinton administration. However, the perception was that during his four-year tenure, his accomplishments toward that goal had not matched his rhetoric.38
Leahy wasn't the only one viewing Gingrich with suspicion. Oklahoma's Sandie Crosroe was also a skeptic:
We formed as a group when we saw top down techniques being used in what we thought was a collaborative effort. Then we did the research and found that globalist Newt Gingrich was being promoted as our leader and web pages directing shared lists and fundraising around his organization. We purposed to not drive traffic to the national website for that reason and will do everything in our power to keep the movement safe in local hands. But you will have to be vigilant and help. Groups are welcome to help and promote to their own lists and attend and participate. Glenn Beck is now promoting the movement as well, but he is not asking for your lists and money and is to be commended for that.39
Additionally, Crosroe exhorted TEA Party groups to “be sure that your… effort stays grassroots and nonpartisan.” Surely she was disappointed with what was to come, but I'll get to that.40
Also stepping up its efforts in the second round was the group founded by Ron Paul, the Campaign for Liberty. In a show of solidarity with the cause by Campaign for Liberty supporters, more and more of their signs began popping up at various events, while Paul himself was a featured speaker at the TEA Party held in his district.41 Campaign for Liberty president John Tate was quick to remind people about their role in the original 2007 Boston Tea Party moneybomb and protest held during Paul's presidential campaign.42
With the additional time to get organized, the Tax Day TEA Parties would become a spectacle that dwarfed the original February effort, with reportedly over 750 rallies nationwide.43 In the larger cities, these protests drew crowds in the thousands, but even more impressive was the number of small communities which had more modest gatherings for the first time – places like Greensburg, Pennsylvania,44 Monticello, Arkansas,45 or Millersburg, Ohio.46 Those three communities represented small town America quite well as your average county seats, and while there may have only been 100 to 200 people at their events, they remained united with the common purpose of petitioning for a redress of grievances.47 (My local Tax Day TEA Party in Salisbury, Maryland drew 400 to 500 people on a chilly, rainy April afternoon. I covered the affair on my own website.)48
But within that seven-week period between the initial February protests and Tax Day, the TEA Party moved beyond a protest of “Porkulus” and mortgage relief programs into a full-blown indictment of the nation's overall financial situation. By selecting a day where Americans were expected to have their pound of flesh extracted by Uncle Sam this change could be expected, but many of the attendees were most concerned about the effect the burgeoning national debt would have on the fate of their kids. One speaker at the Richmond TEA Party contended that her children would be 17, 15, and 12 in ten years and have a projected $17 trillion dollar deficit on their heads by that point.49 (Sadly, it turns out that she was too optimistic: we went beyond $20 trillion in debt with 18 months or so to spare before that decade was up.)
While the smaller communities generally maintained local organization for their TEA Parties, some of the larger cities began to attract celebrities drawn to the cause: Fox News (and nationally syndicated radio talk show) host Sean Hannity broadcast his evening show from the Atlanta TEA Party,50 while his Fox network cohort Neil Cavuto appeared at the California TEA Party in Sacramento. Yet it was a local blogger to whom Cavuto pointed out the events weren't party-based, but “country-based.”51
With all that airtime, some on the other side of the fence politically believed Fox News was doing more than covering the TEA Party – they were putting their thumb on the scale.
In Fox and affiliated conservative outlets, the Tea Party took on meaning not only as a political grouping, but also as a vital cultural force. Fox News assigned the Tea Party a starring role in what conservatives understand as a long-running culture war between coastal elites and middle Americans… Tea Party members think of the elite not primarily as an economic category but as a cultural stratum, a coterie of liberal intellectuals and bureaucrats who wish to impose ideas and schemes about matters such as economic redistribution and environmental regulation on unwitting regular Americans. Fox News coverage of the Tea Party both draws upon and fuels this potent interpretation.52
The authors go on to explain the significant change in attention brought on by Fox's wall-to-wall Tea Party coverage. As an example, CNN went from openly questioning their competitor's cheerleading in the weeks leading up to the Tax Day TEA Party rallies to promising more full coverage as the event neared – including a guest appearance by Chicago TEA Party organizer Eric Odom on April 14 – to the further steps of embedding a reporter on the first Tea Party Express (TPX) tour later that summer and eventually broadcasting, among other things, the 'Tea Party response' to President Obama's 2010 State of the Union address and a Republican presidential candidate debate co-sponsored with TPX in September, 2011.
However, argued St. Louis organizer Dana Loesch, “Our progress isn’t measured by whether or not CNN loves us, but (it) can be measured by how badly certain outlets want to shut us up.”53 If you watched the remaining network nightly news, you were told this vast amount of unrest, involving tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people, could be boiled down to one sentiment: sour grapes from the conservative Right, upset at losing the election.54 They also reiterated that President Obama had made his own tax relief plan part of the ARRA which, according to the White House, “helps 95% of working families” and has “70% of the tax benefits (going) to the middle 60% of American workers.”55 (While this may have addressed the original point of Americans being “Taxed Enough Already,” it didn't change the equation when it came to spending – particularly when the Democrats were known for saying that tax cuts were a cost to the government.)
The Obama Administration was asked directly about their reaction to the protests, and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs maintained that party line under the questioning:
Q. Does the White House have any response to the protests, the tea party protests going on across the street and in other parts of the country?
MR. GIBBS: I don’t know if there's a specific response to protests as much as there is – I think you saw the President today talk about as candidate Obama promising to bring a tax cut to 95 percent of working families in America, and as President delivering that tax cut.56
Two weeks after the Tax Day protests, President Obama more directly addressed the spending concerns, telling a Missouri town hall meeting:
So, you know, when you see – those of you who are watching certain news channels on which I'm not very popular and you see folks waving tea bags around, let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we're going to stabilize Social Security.57
While 18 members of the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition accepted that invitation,58 it's worth noting that nothing further, let alone any “serious conversation,” came of it.
If the February protests were considered a shot across the bow by the Left, though, their panic in seeing the extent of the Tax Day protests meant all hands were required on deck. On the more conventional side, they took the approach of calling the protests “Astroturf” due to the Washington-based conservative groups FreedomWorks, AFP, and American Solutions taking the lead on organizing some of the larger events.59 60 In a similar vein, some mainstream media coverage assigned the TEA Party a proxy role as GOP shills. Erika Franzi, blogging from Asheville, North Carolina:
Unfortunately and predictably, the media still doesn’t get it. They don’t know what to do with us, so they are under-reporting our numbers and repeating the false charge that we are GOP operatives. We’re going to have to give them another object lesson in non-partisan activism on July 4th.61
Of course, this “Astroturf” argument may have covered some of the events where these national groups indeed assisted with logistics and in-kind donations, but it didn't explain why there were so many TEA Parties that seemed to independently spring up in the smaller towns and communities around the nation. St. Louis organizer Dana Loesch was fairly blunt in that regard of local organization in the face of national interest, blogging about FreedomWorks that their “netroots, frankly, sucks”:
Their involvement in the St. Louis protest was nonexistent and while they issued press release after press release explaining how their members were available for interviews and trying to score media access so as to promote themselves, this was more of a bother than any help. It’s difficult when you’re trying to put something together to have a group you can’t vouch for running behind you, talking to the media and giving out inaccurate information while not bothering to assist with the grunt work – and assistance was welcome!62
Since the “Astroturf” approach could be proven false, the naysayers continued the approach of crying bias about Fox News. Here's an example from the left-wing Media Matters for America:
Despite its repeated insistence that its coverage is "fair and balanced" and its invitation to viewers to "say 'no' to biased media," in recent weeks, Fox News has frequently aired segments encouraging viewers to get involved with "tea party" protests across the country, which the channel has often described as primarily a response to President Obama's fiscal policies. Specifically, Fox News has in dozens of instances provided attendance and organizing information for future protests, such as protest dates, locations and website URLs. Fox News websites have also posted information and publicity material for protests. Fox News hosts have repeatedly encouraged viewers to join them at several April 15 protests that they are attending and covering; during the April 6 edition of Glenn Beck, on-screen text characterized these events as "FNC Tax Day Tea Parties." Tea-party organizers have used the planned attendance of the Fox News hosts to promote their protests. Fox News has also aired numerous interviews with protest organizers. Moreover, Fox News contributors are listed as "Tea Party Sponsor[s]" on TaxDayTeaParty.com.63
Remember, these were the hosts of individual shows that drew the wrath of Media Matters, not necessarily the news programs. In watching these shows, it didn't take too long for a viewer to figure out most of the Fox hosts leaned to the right politically. Considering there already was a perception out there that the other news networks were severely left-of-center in their outlook, Fox News was simply reflecting what their audience wanted to hear about, reading it perfectly. Indeed, it's likely they had a significant effect on the attendance at these gatherings, whether from having their personalities at the largest ones or as a driver of interest in the small county seats.
Yet there was one other aspect of this left-wing rejection of the TEA Party that made it an inside joke to a certain class of people, and that was the term “teabagger.” Just days before the Tax Day TEA Parties, far-left MSNBC host Rachel Maddow decided it was time to take advantage of the naivete of average Americans regarding the Urban Dictionary definition of the term64 – something Sir Thomas Lipton probably never dreamed would be associated with his products. In one seven-minute segment of her show65 she barely could contain herself, mirthful about the less savory connotation of the term that easily 95 percent of the average TEA Party attendees were unaware of.
Needless to say, the Left quickly picked up the word “teabagger” as the derogatory way to refer to those Americans who were participating in these anti-tax protests, and eventually to conservatives in general. It was funny within the far-left echo chamber, but also showed they didn't have a whole lot to battle with in terms of good policy ideas given how poorly concerns about the economy were being addressed by the Obama administration they were supporting.
While the usage of “teabagger” illustrated the cultural divide among those in the rapidly growing TEA Party and those who strongly opposed it, there was a small schism among factions within the movement as well – a break which would grow as the TEA Party did. In a message stressed mostly in the more rural regions of the nation, speakers at the various Tax Day TEA Parties brought up the fact that millions of Americans were never born because of legalized abortion. While the libertarian elements who claimed they truly began the TEA Party movement in 2007 would likely be described as fiscally conservative but socially liberal – the “keep the government out of our bedroom” crowd – as the TEA Party circle in the political Venn diagram of American politics grew, it was also bound to incorporate elements within the socially conservative pro-life religious Right that agreed with the overall “taxed enough already” umbrella of fiscal responsibility but also acted as one of the legs of the oft-quoted three-legged stool of conservatism with their emphasis on religiously-based family values. Over the next months and years, this rift became a source of tension within the TEA Party as each side of this divide blamed the other for political goals not achieved.
As spring turned into summer, the planning was there for yet another wave of TEA Parties: the Independence Day holiday became the third rallying point for the group in just over four months. By this time, the number of groups participating was well over 1,000 and organizers were expecting huge numbers of Americans to attend their local events. (I was one of them, as our local TEA Party had a July 4 event, too.)66
Elizabeth Klimp, then a research fellow at the Capital Research Center, wrote an excellent, succinct description of these local TEA Parties that were being formed; one to keep in mind as you read on:
Like other grassroots movements, the overwhelming majority of Tea Party activists are volunteers who are organizing activities around issues and candidates in their local communities. A typical Tea Party organization has a small organizing nucleus, or board of trustees, that oversees a larger number of volunteers. The board handles the group’s communications, fund-raising and logistics, usually without any direction from a larger state, regional or national organization. Individual groups develop their own platform, objectives, and plans of action, generally without input or assistance from larger state or national coordinating bodies. The typical group is independent, but shares with other Tea Party groups a common platform of reverence for the Founding Fathers and the U.S. Constitution and support for fiscal responsibility, limited government, and personal liberty.
There are state and national Tea Party organizations, but typically they facilitate communication among Tea Party groups and serve as networking agents rather than try to stage or direct local grassroots activities. These larger organizations also try to attract national attention to the movement. They organize its larger rallies or series of rallies, train activists on practical aspects of organizing, and propose themes or platforms that can galvanize Tea Party support.67
Ironically, Independence Day of 2009 turned out to be the high-water mark for this localized phase of the TEA Party movement as plans were already underway to hold a set of massive, nationwide demonstrations the weekend after Labor Day.68 Spearheaded by the group FreedomWorks, which hatched the idea during the first few weeks of the TEA Party movement, the “Taxpayer March on Washington” expected “over ten thousand liberty-loving activists” to converge on the nation's capital, with ancillary events in other cities around the nation expected to add to the total number of people involved. As I pointed out in my introduction, it turned out their expectations of the Washington event were set way too low.
For the movement to carry on, though, it had to come under a national umbrella in more than name. By nature, these individual TEA Party groups were fiercely independent, and while they may have received assistance from national organizations like FreedomWorks, AFP, and so forth, they had their own goals and agendas to consider. So as the movement worked its way forward after the spring and summer of 2009, even as various groups tried to take a leadership role at the statewide and national levels, the overall message coordination between local TEA Party groups became harder to come by and their efforts and tactics began to become more divergent.
For example, of those TEA Party groups which carried on after the summer protests, a number of them morphed into local AFP affiliates or aligned themselves with the Campaign for Liberty, becoming more like political clubs with monthly meetings and tactics more in line with standard party politics. This commonality with party groups included a regular diet of guest speakers such as local elected officials or representatives from one of these national groups. Conversely, other organizations kept the TEA Party name and their regimen of public protests – some carrying on for several years.69 These bouts of outspokenness occurred less and less frequently, though, as the TEA Party matured and changed its form, with local groups eventually realizing it was okay to band together to adopt broader organizational schemes on a state or regional level in order to consolidate their political power with larger numbers. These groups, in turn, were claimed under the umbrella of a small national core of TEA Party leaders who came together in just a few different entities.
With a cause that had drawn people like Florida's Mary Rakovich, Seattle “porkulus” protest organizer Keri Carender, and Susan Brubaker, the Kansas woman who had “never protested in my life” but decided this was the place to make her stand, the TEA Party was a mother lode of political activists who were barely tapped by the established party machines and inside-the-Beltway lobbying entities. In fact, North Carolina's Ralph Reagan was one local TEA Party leader who doubled as a local Republican leader and saw this as a recruiting opportunity for the GOP.
As Chairman I had the first Tea Party rally because I wanted to transform my local with fresh energy and pull it to the right. I had rallies until I was no longer Chairman (as) my idea of recruiting was offensive to the RINOs. And I had great opposition (from some in the TEA Party) because I was a Republican.70
In the minds of ambitious people and groups, some already connected to the national political establishment and some who longed to be, the nascent movement was a meal ticket to be punched – or simply rubes to be exploited. Nature abhors a vacuum, and there was no shortage of folks who wanted to fill that vacuum by leading the TEA Party.
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 The story of Rakovich is told from a FreedomWorks point of view in the Dick Armey and Matt Kibbe book, Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto (New York: William Morrow, 2010)
3 http://redistributingknowledge.blogspot.com/2009/02/day-is-here-protesterama.html Since my original research in 2017, this page has been taken private and is not archived.
4 https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/11/11/rise_of_the_tea_party_112035.html
5 Sending tea bags wasn't an original or new idea. It has been recycled from time to time – here's an example from 1989. http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1989-02-08/news/8901080135_1_tea-bags-roy-fox-lee-fowler
6 http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2096654_2096653_2096665,00.html
7 http://independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/01/boston-tea-party-calls-for-bailout-tea-party/
8 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/05/us-midterm-elections-2010-tea-party-movement
9 Reporter and author David Brody also notes financial expert Dave Ramsey “proclaimed, 'It's time for a Tea Party” in Brody's book Teavangelicals, cited elsewhere in this volume.
10 http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/09/stop-the-stimulus-protest-in-ft-myers-fl-tomorrow/
11 http://readmylipsticknetwork.blogspot.com/2009/02/stimulus-protest-tomorrow-fort-myers-fl.html
12 http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/16/from-the-boston-tea-party-to-your-neighborhood-pork-protest/
13 http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/17/yes-we-care-porkulus-protesters-holler-back/
14 http://archive.azcentral.com/community/mesa/articles/2009/02/18/20090218prez-protest0218.html
15 http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/19/gimme-gimme-gimme-more-scenes-from-the-anti-obama-backlash/ Malkin had a little snark as well: noting Santelli's remarks (as a “CNBC host”) calling for a tea party for the first time, she pithily added “We've been doing it all week.”
16 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-brantzawadzki/a-time-for-tea-a-tea-part_b_538963.html As you can see in subsequent notes, though, the timeline is inaccurate on a few items. I love the first line of the story, though: “It would take a book or three to provide a comprehensive documentation of every aspect of the origins of the Tea Party movement.” Here you go.
17 Not only did the Illinois Libertarian Party chair at the time, Dave Brady, claim “in December of 2008 the LP Illinois formulated the Boston Tea Party Chicago concept...Santelli got wind of this and went public on the floor of the Chicago Stock (sic) Exchange” (see http://independentpoliticalreport.com/2009/04/libertarian-party-of-illinois-we-gave-rick-santelli-the-idea-for-the-tax-day-tea-parties/) but a WHOIS search of the Chicagoteaparty.com domain confirms it was created in August, 2008.
18 http://michaelpatrickleahy.blogspot.com/2009/02/tcot-and-online-conservatives-launch.html I slightly edited this from the original.
19 http://web.archive.org/web/20090226220005/http://www.nationwidechicagoteaparty.com/ According to the domain's WHOIS information, it expired in February, 2017.
20 Archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20090223100929/http://www.taxpayerteaparty.com/. Americans for Prosperity was linked at the bottom of the page, which opens by shouting “Rick Santelli was dead right!”
21 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/18/republicans-internet-barack-obama
22 http://michellemalkin.com/2009/02/26/lets-get-this-tea-party-started/
23 Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin: Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2012) p. 9.
24 Notes from telephone conversation with Gary Aminoff. January 28, 2018.
25 https://janeqrepublican.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/asheville-area-tea-party-a-rainy-day-success/
26 Notes from telephone conversation with Joan Fabiano, February 25, 2018.
27 Social media conversation with Eric Eisenhammer, January 28, 2018.
28 I found a number of “Chicago Tea Party” videos with a simple Bing search of “tea party february 27 2009” under the “Videos” tab. They made for an interesting day of watching.
29 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-unveils-75b-mortgage-relief-plan/
30 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-signs-stimulus-plan-into-law/
31 Meckler and Martin, p. 5.
32 Paraphrased from Michael Patrick Leahy: Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement (New York: Broadside Books, 2012) p. 233.
33
34
35 http://apackof2-theworldaccordingtome.blogspot.com/2009/02/over-300-at-lansing-mi-tea-party.html As I spoke with Fabiano, I learned about her blogsite. She has photos of the Lansing rally, although the site hasn't been updated since 2012.
36 Meckler and Martin, p. 19-20.
37
38 Leahy, p. 229.
39 https://scrosnoe.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/grassroots-teaparty-efforts-and-you/
40 Ibid.
41
42 https://web.archive.org/web/20090418190507/http://www.ronpaul.com/2009-04-15/nationwide-tax-protests-party-like-its-2007/ The original Tate statement was not available on the Campaign for Liberty site.
43 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/16/us/politics/16taxday.html
44
– Greensburg, Pennsylvania.
45
– Montecello, Arkansas.
46
– Millersburg, Ohio. All three videos have background music and everything.
47 Just like the February 27 iteration, a Bing video search of “tax day tea party april 15 2009” unlocked a host of videos from gatherings big and small. And I'm sure this only scratches the surface.
48 http://monoblogue.us/2009/04/15/pictures-from-salisburys-tea-party/
49
51
52 Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) p. 136-137.
53 https://thedanashow.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/retrospect/
55 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/video/Real-Tax-Cuts-Making-a-Real-Difference This is the video, as the original statement was archived in 2017 after I began this chapter.
57 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/video/Town-Hall-in-Arnold-Missouri#transcript
59 http://www.prwatch.org/spin/2009/04/8334/freedomworks-behind-tax-day-tea-party-protests
61 https://janeqrepublican.wordpress.com/2009/04/16/asheville-tax-day-tea-party-amazing-success/
62 https://thedanashow.wordpress.com/2009/03/03/i-wish-i-were-funded-by-billionaires/
63 http://mediamatters.org/research/2009/04/08/report-fair-and-balanced-fox-news-aggressively/149009
64 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=teabagging
65 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/09/rachel-maddow-ana-marie-c_n_185445.html
66 Unfortunately, my website's archiving of photos doesn't extend to this post.
68 http://www.freedomworks.org/content/taxpayer-march-washington-scheduled-september-12-2009
69 https://web.archive.org/web/20180309055128/http://www.teapartyfortlauderdale.com/ After the death of its founder, they dropped the TEA Party moniker but planned to continue the weekly meetings.
70 E-mail exchange with Ralph Reagan, January 1, 2018.
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 3: Uprising: A Call for Leadership.
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…