Chapter 3: Uprising: A Call for Leadership
Chapter 3: Uprising: A Call for Leadership
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.
“It seemed that the government of our country was promoting the idea that everyone deserved a bailout when they got in financial trouble. We didn't think we deserved a bailout. Like most Americans, we believed in taking responsibility for our own situation in life.” - Jenny Beth Martin, Tea Party Patriots.
It was a tumultuous first five months for the nascent political movement, but once the July 4 wave of TEA Parties passed it became quite apparent that having one thousand local groups with just as many different agendas meant a whole lot of willing workers for the TEA Party cause – the problem was that it was also a lot like herding cats. Even so, there were ambitious groups and people with different causes who were very willing to try steering the herd in order to further their own goals and careers, and with any luck perhaps even make a little coin out of the deal.
This part of the TEA Party story began a few months earlier, as the vision for the February “Chicago TEA Parties” was laid out the day after Rick Santelli took the conservative internet by storm with his CNBC rant. A group of organizers inspired by the outburst of support for Santelli “hijacked”1 the “Top Conservatives on Twitter” (TCOT) conference call between activists and groups who were already interested in promoting the conservative cause. Some time later, author and evangelist Michael Patrick Leahy – who as the creator of TCOT was among the early group putting the protests together – placed on his personal website a fairly comprehensive list that he claimed chronicled both the participants in the February 20, 2009 TCOT conference call and the organizers of the various local “Chicago TEA Parties” a week later.2
In that post, Leahy also documents an e-mail exchange he had in 2011 with fellow TEA Party founder Jenny Beth Martin where he revealed that he had several goals in mind for these events:
I would add that articulating the "strike while the iron is hot" argument I made was largely a detailed articulation of what everyone on the call probably already felt. You may recall there was virtually no pushback on that.
The other elements I added were:
(1) The need to focus on a simultaneous nationwide event (The Nationwide Chicago Tea Party) (2) With a narrowly focused theme (Repeal the Pork or Retire), which we (3) Actively promoted and then documented using video cameras and social media.
On the last point, you will recall Christina Botteri emphasized the importance of digitally documenting the event, with either video or still photos. The key to the success of the February 27, 2009 "Nationwide Chicago Tea Party" held in 30 cities with 50,000 attendees was that all the participants were very careful to document the event, then kick it back to Christina and me, and we in turn disseminated the pictures, videos, etc. to all our friends in the blogosphere (Michelle Malkin, Instapundit, etc.) and any national networks that provided coverage. You may recall that both MSNBC and FoxNews provided bits of coverage for that event. Local TV, actually, did a pretty good job covering the event in almost every one of the 50 markets.
You will also recall that on the February 20, 2009 call, TCOT, SGP, and Dontgo combined to form http://www.nationwideteapartycoalition.com , the group that organized and sponsored both the February 27, 2009 Nationwide Chicago Tea Party and the April 15, 2009 Tax Day Tea Party.3
Interestingly, in his list of TEA Party “founders” Leahy considers himself as “support” rather than a local organizer.
But in considering the fate of the TEA Party nearly a decade later, I believe it's worth pointing out that the large majority of this group of initial organizers never became known on the national scene. Surely some of the 90-plus local organizers were happy to be simple citizen activists, but there were others who found out their goals no longer meshed with those of the overall movement as it evolved. As this book continues on, you will notice a number of the names Leahy cited are repeated frequently but at the outset this was a listing of the core group of TEA Party supporters who were disgusted enough with the prospect of rampant Keynesian spending and government overreach that they took the time to organize the first wave of events. As the weeks went on these “everyday American citizens” saw their ranks increase tenfold and more as new organizers in cities large and small across the nation joined in. And while the more nationally-known players that took the reins of the overall movement determined its eventual fate, I also wanted to hear the perspective from a number of the other players, too. So they will also play a key role in telling this story.
As the February 27 “Chicago TEA Party” became a reality, there were three heretofore obscure online groups that took on the role of key sponsors and leadership in coordinating the message: Leahy's TCOT, the #Dontgo movement represented by its co-founder Eric Odom, and Smart Girl Politics (SGP), represented by its co-founder Stacy Mott. None of these groups had existed even a year earlier, but in this new wave of online organizing this trio of entities grabbed the TEA Party baton and ran with it, coming together as the Nationwide TEA Party Coalition on February 20 in order to promote the first series of events. (Also included in the initial set of sponsors were the more established Americans for Tax Reform, Heartland Institute, and The American Spectator magazine.)4 It was a happy accident that Leahy, Odom, and Mott were on the conference call and became involved together.
To illustrate the latent group of Americans who were ready for some sort of defense against the progressive onslaught the previous few months had brought, it should be pointed out that the TCOT conference calls had only begun a few weeks earlier, the outgrowth of a group which had rapidly expanded from a handful of bloggers to over three thousand by the time the first TEA Parties were organized.5 Its main #TCOT Report page was, as they said, “obviously modeled on Drudge” right down to the graphic style.6 Leahy's aim in creating TCOT was to counter what he saw as the dominance of the Left when it came to social media,7 and he chose the Twitter platform because he believed the field was more open to conservatives than was Facebook. (Even so, by mid-2008 Barack Obama was the most-followed person on Twitter.)8
The Obama campaign team spent months building up a social media following through the campaign, allowing him to dominate the internet on his way to election in 2008.9 But where Leahy succeeded was the promotion of using the #TCOT hashtag as a medium for Twitter searching: suddenly there was a way for conservatives to easily share and find links to items of interest to them, and thousands of people used that shorthand to learn about the budding TEA Party movement. In his later book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, Leahy explained how the idea of #TCOT originated:
(M)any of those on the now-growing Top Conservatives on Twitter list suggested that we needed to adopt a “hashtag,” so that it would be easier for anyone on Twitter to follow the ongoing conservative conversation. One of our members, a seventy-eight-year-old grandmother from Welasco, Texas, Beulah Garrett, suggested that we use the abbreviation of the list's name, thus the hashtag #tcot. By the end of the second full week, there were more than one thousand names on the list and #tcot was consistently on the Twitter top-trending topics.10
Not long afterward the TEA Party began to spread itself over Facebook as well, conservatives finally joining the battle in social media.
On the other hand, while Eric Odom's #Dontgo movement was initially social-media based, as a hashtag and Twitter presence it was very modest – and short-lived after the initial wave of TEA Parties.11
Odom and the #Dontgo idea seemed to be somewhat of an odd fit for the TEA Party, anyway. Describing himself as “very libertarian,” he eventually ended up denouncing several of the TEA Party organizations that sprang up as the movement matured.12 (By the end of 2017, Odom had abandoned the political world entirely, reinventing himself as a travelogue editor and filmmaker.)13 Moreover, the idea of #Dontgo had nothing to do with the fiscal irresponsibility of the federal government: it was formed over the summer of 2008 to back Congressional Republicans who wanted to stay in Washington over the summer and overturn a federal ban on offshore oil drilling as a way of addressing surging gasoline prices. Over time, the #Dontgo moniker was scrapped and the organization formalized and evolved into the American Liberty Alliance. That organization also had a brief lifespan, with Odom eventually acquiring a reputation as a “charlatan” among some in the TEA Party thanks to the number of changes his various organizations went through, as RedState's Erick Erickson documented in 2010.14
The third part of this original triumvirate was Mott's SGP group, which has remained as a website and social media outlet aimed at conservative women since the earliest days of the TEA Party. It was created with a different goal in mind, but turned out to be the right group at the right time for the TEA Party. “Other organizations (aimed at conservative women) have more history, more political background,” explained Mott, “and I think there are many pros and cons to being outsiders and grassroots, but I think it has helped us to reach out to other women who are similar to us.”15
By September, 2009 SGP claimed to have 20,000 members between Facebook and the Ning social media network; they still have over 20,000 Twitter followers and close to 35,000 on Facebook. Outside of social media, for several years the group also put on a Smart Girl Politics Summit, with the first edition featuring journalist Michelle Malkin, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, and Bush-era diplomat Liz Cheney. Other notables who appeared at SGP Summits included Reps. Cathy McMorris Rogers and Michele Bachmann, commentators S.E. Cupp and Erick Erickson, journalist James O'Keeffe, the late Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, and 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain.
Of the three primary online groups that began the Nationwide TEA Party Coalition, SGP was perhaps the most “traditional” political group in that they were the most formally organized and held events of their own which weren't TEA Party-related. At its heart, though, it was a grassroots organization like the other two, which made it a little surprising that they were the group promoting an enhanced TEA Party alliance with a more mainstream, inside-the-Beltway organization. In mid-March Newt Gingrich's American Solutions joined the Nationwide TEA Party Coalition during the run up to the Tax Day TEA Parties.16
This isn't to say that more mainline conservative organizations were eschewing the original Nationwide Chicago TEA Party, but their impact was mainly limited to co-sponsoring the local Washington, D.C. affair. The accusations of “Astroturf” demonstrations stemmed from that particular event's sponsor list, which included Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, Young Conservatives Coalition, The Heartland Institute, National Taxpayers Union, FreedomWorks, and the Institute for Liberty.17 By association with the Washington, D.C. event, other local TEA Parties were in turn criticized by the Left as “Astroturf.” Wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman as the Tax Day editions were approaching:
(I)t turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.18
A couple years later, authors Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson summed up contributions made by established lobbying groups in the early days like this:
Indeed, one of the most important consequences of the widespread Tea Party agitations unleashed from the start of Obama's presidency was the populist boost given to professionally run and opulently funded right-wing advocacy organizations devoted to pushing ultra-free-market policies.19
In fact, by that time many of these national organizations had jumped on board, but they were only following the grassroots effort in order to further their cause because they didn't originate it. Imagine some revisionist history: what if the Nationwide Chicago TEA Parties only drew a couple dozen people apiece to maybe a dozen cities? Would any of these inside-the-Beltway organizations would have given the remaining promoters the time of day afterward? I doubt it. Success breeds success, and these national entities were just trying to elbow their way onto the ground floor with the most ambitious organizers and original members of the Nationwide TEA Party Coalition. “(T)he involvement of FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity during those first months was primarily because the movement could be a source of fund-raising. In that regard, it proved to be a very effective tool for them,”20 opined Michael Patrick Leahy.
In looking at Leahy's list of local organizers ten years on, there are a lot of names people in the conservative political world would recognize: from Sacramento came Mark Meckler, from Atlanta came Jenny Beth Martin and Amy Kremer, Eric Odom represented Chicago, Dana Loesch from St. Louis, Katrina Pearson and Ken Emanuelson from Dallas, and so forth. New media personalities Michele Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, Jim Hoft, and Ace of Spades are still well-known today. They are some of the TEA Party survivors who used the movement as a springboard to further their ambitions.
But there were some organizers who were listed as “anonymous” on the Leahy list, whether out of lack of reliable information on their identity or a true desire to remain secret. We hadn't yet seen the sheer bullying and hatred with which some on the Left address conservatives today, but it's likely there were a few who were reticent to make it known they were the local TEA Party leaders. Perhaps they sensed in advance what the media was ready to say about this potential political juggernaut – a topic I'll visit in due course.
Meanwhile, the Nationwide TEA Party Coalition was in the process of evolving. At about the time of the Tax Day TEA Party rallies – a Wall Street Journal story pegs the date as April 1221 – Atlanta TEA Party organizer Jenny Beth Martin formed a new group called the Tea Party Patriots. Over the next month as the group incorporated into a formal entity, Martin, fellow Atlanta organizer Amy Kremer, and Mark Meckler from Sacramento emerged as its leaders. However, it was not just their effort: a number of members of the Nationwide TEA Party Coalition went on to serve with the Tea Party Patriots board of directors. While the Coalition carried on for some time afterward, their original, preeminent position in leadership quickly shifted to the new organization. (As evidence, the NTPC had a website through most of 2017 but it had not been updated in over seven years and had disappeared entirely by the middle of 2018.)22
In essence, the purpose of the Tea Party Patriots was to give some direction to what had previously been a relatively loose, ragtag collection of groups. The system in place was fine when the TEA Party was a modest coordination of a few dozen who gathered to do what was originally figured as a one-off event, but in order to create a more lasting political impact some group was going to have to become a source of leadership. And because it was a grassroots organization, as opposed to a Beltway-based group of lobbyists like FreedomWorks or Americans for Prosperity, this was a way to maintain the trust of activists who would look askance at the TEA Party if they felt it was just another tool for the Washington establishment. That “establishment” charge rubbed the TPP founders the wrong way:
Our detractors have accused us of being tools of the political establishment. They suggest that everything that we have done has been planned from some back room in Washington, D.C. It is only natural that they would suspect this, because it is the way their movements operate. They cannot imagine or accept the truth: that we are a true grassroots movement of citizens who joined together to defend America against politicians who swore to uphold the Constitution, but instead fed it through a shredder along with trillions of our taxpayer dollars. Our detractors cannot accept that we are who we are, because it threatens their warped worldview. And so they convince themselves… that we are an “Astroturf” group; that our leaders are manipulated by the Republican Party, or by Big Business, or any one of a thousand different entities.23
The existing national groups' political muscle and connections were valuable as common cause, but for the grassroots movement to succeed there had to be the impression that outsider regular folk were the ones calling the tune. Libertarian blogger Stephen Gordon made this point early on, writing on April 9, “If the big boys want to jump on board, that's fine, so long as the grassroots continue to control the message. However, I'd be the first one protesting Republican spending if Newt Gingrich or John McCain showed up at my local TEA Party.”24
Unfortunately for them, one thing the Tea Party Patriots could not do was trademark the term “TEA Party.”25 At about the same time the Patriots were being incorporated, a second group was being formed from the roots of an already-existing organization in Sacramento, California.
When they began life as the Our Country Deserves Better (OCDB) committee during the 2008 campaign, the group that eventually became the Tea Party Express (TPX) sponsored the “Stop Obama Tour.” Stopping in 35 cities in battleground states over two weeks, this campaign whistle-stop bus tour featured three main spokespeople: Gold Star Mom Deborah Johns, Sacramento radio personality Mark Williams, and singer/songwriter Lloyd Marcus.26 Once the 2008 campaign was over, OCDB hit the airwaves with a Thanksgiving-themed ad thanking vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin for the common-sense conservatism she brought to the GOP ticket,27 but as 2009 dawned they were basically a spent organization aimlessly wandering the fringes of the conservative movement until one OCDB leader attended the Tax Day TEA Party in Sacramento and quickly saw the opportunity.
You'll hear a lot more about Mark Williams as this story goes on, but this is what he told me about the scene in Sacramento:
I had been vice-chair of Our Country Deserves Better PAC for some months and had already made one national speaking sweep in advance of Obama’s 2008 election. This particular day I caught wind of a band of folks gathering at the Capitol for an ad hoc demonstration that they were calling “Tea Party” which caught my ear. I had participated in a 1978 radio talk-driven Tea Party campaign in Massachusetts to fight a legislative pay raise and a driver of a second one in 1989 that forced repeal of a 50% Congressional pay raise and the resignation of then-House Speaker Jim Wright (D-TX) so this idea was right up my alley. I knew the entire blueprint for success because I had helped write it and then revise it.
On the day in California it was sincere but disorganized with no clear agenda or plan so I did two things. First I called my PAC office down the street and told staff to high tail it the couple of blocks over because this was the something we needed to pull together the emerging Citizen Patriot movement that was stirring. (Think the Statue of Liberty in the second Ghostbusters movie. It was almost like that moment when the image of Liberty on the NY license plate hits them. One of those.) The second thing I did was step up, stand on a barrier, start addressing the crowd with a totally off the cuff speech and proceeded to encourage and emcee others, and took over. I guess I basically just said something like follow me, I know where we’re going and how to get there. There were many things broken that had to be fixed. Sadly (this) sounds corny, but millions of others heard and answered the same call to duty and obligation as did I.28
OCDB quickly rebranded themselves as the Tea Party Express, taking advantage of the name recognition the movement had quickly built up. In a memo made public a year later by Politico,29 OCDB's Joe Wierzbicki outlined the TPX idea, but cautioned that it may step on a few toes.
“The Tea Party Express” will be led by the leadership of the Our Country Deserves Better Committee (Mark Williams and Deborah Johns), musical performers (Lloyd Marcus who has tentatively confirmed his participation and also Rivoli Revue of “A Bailout Song” who have expressed an interest in working with us but who have yet to get back to me about their availability or their willingness to participate in the tour), key staff (Joe Wierzbicki, Kelly Eustis, and if available, Sal Russo), Gary Pon of Free Republic (what's a national tour without him!) and potentially one other individual to serve as a speaker (an example would be Lew Uhler of the National Tax Limitation Committee) and hopefully two additional staffers. We might also choose to invite a blogger to come along with us to blog on the tour (one who is respected by leading conservative bloggers).
At each “tea party” stop we will also invite to speak the following types of individuals: local tea party leaders, fiscally conservative political candidates, local officials or dignitaries, local talk radio hosts, etc.
It is also possible that we might invite Pajamas TV, national tea party or conservative leaders such as Michael Patrick Leahy of Top Conservatives on Twitter, or other such individuals to come with us. This will be a very sensitive matter that we will need to discuss in the coming days. We have to be very very careful about discussing amongst ourselves anyone we include “outside of the family” because quite frankly, we are not only NOT part of the political establishment or conservative establishment, but we are also sadly not currently a part of the “tea party” establishment (i.e. Michelle Malkin, Eric Odom of Don't Go Movement, Smart Girl Politics, Top Conservatives on Twitter, FreedomWorks, Newt Gingrich of American Solutions, etc.)
We can probably pull off a phenomenally successful tour without these big-ego establishment types, provided that we do a good job in getting the word out to local tea party leaders and grass roots conservatives who operate in their local communities independently as is – the April 15th tea parties may have been promoted by Fox News, Pajamas TV, Michelle Malkin, FreedomWorks, American Solutions, etc...however almost all of the tea parties were organized and led by individual activists in local communities.30
Wierzbicki went on to propose a few key Senatorial targets: Harry Reid of Nevada, Chris Dodd in Connecticut, and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a moderate Republican who was chosen in large part to make the protest less strictly partisan against Democrats. He also conceded that most of the financial interest would be concentrated on the individual expenditure accounts opposing these candidates, since the benefits would accrue to a political action committee.
Because of this political background, the TPX had a key philosophical difference with the Tea Party Patriots: they were willing to directly support and campaign on behalf of individual candidates, while the Tea Party Patriots studiously tried to avoid choosing sides in individual races for several years. (In 2013 they finally relented and formed a PAC called the Tea Party Patriots Citizen Fund.)31
Thus, the Tea Party Express was born. True to their name and their original stated goal, their first major action was a coast-to-coast bus tour which began in late August and scheduled its final stop at the 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington. That event brings in a third key early player.
While FreedomWorks – a contributing sponsor of both the February and April TEA Party events – was fine with the concept of local protests and individual action such as they had achieved during the fight over the TARP program described earlier, they had a director of federal and state campaigns who dreamed a lot bigger. As Brendan Steinhauser described it five years later, he began working out the details of the 9/12 event six months beforehand:
(By) mid-March I had already reached out to the National Park Service in DC and inquired about reserving space for a massive Taxpayer March on Washington. We looked at various routes and locations near the Capitol, but settled on a starting point at Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue and 13th St. NW. I chose the date September 12th, 2009 because it gave us a long time to plan a huge event, and gave the movement time to mature and get organized.32
With the FreedomWorks organization on board, there was a website, a Twitter handle by the end of April33 and Facebook page promoting the event by the middle of June.34 Unlike the other local TEA Parties put together on short notice, this major event was going to be the culmination of months of work, with scheduled speakers running the gamut from TEA Party leaders who weren't politically involved when Barack Obama was elected to inside-the-Beltway fixtures who were providing their assistance to the very movement they had pined for. (Ironically, the predecessor group that spawned both FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity, Citizens for a Sound Economy, was calling for a Tea Party way back in 2002.35 Obviously that appeal fell on deaf ears, probably because national security was more of a voter priority when the 9/11 attacks were still a recent event to them.)
Thanks to coverage on C-SPAN, to this day you can still watch the Taxpayer March on Washington.36 (Maybe if you scan the crowd you will see me there.) And whether you believe the wild early reports of over a million strong in attendance or go with the far smaller estimates of 60 to 70 thousand people, it was still an event that proved the TEA Party movement was coming of age. (I'm not a great judge of crowds, but I would estimate the real number was in the low six figures, perhaps 300,000.)
However, in the ensuing weeks after the 9/12 event we learned that not all was rosy among the groups. Amy Kremer, who was a founding member of the Tea Party Patriots, decided later that month to formally bolt to the TPX, earning her an eviction from the Patriots' board of directors and sparking a bitter feud between the two groups that took months of legal wrangling37 to decide. As the Washington Independent website put the rivalry at the time:
The self-described grassroots activists in Tea Party Patriots and the American Liberty Alliance see the Tea Party Express as a sham organization, using the political heft of the movement to push a bland, partisan Republican agenda. Privately and publicly, they accuse the Tea Party Express of being an “astroturf” outfit, a scheme for Republican strategists and candidates to take advantage of a movement that was chugging along fine without them.38
“They are the classic top-down organization run by G.O.P. consultants, and it is the antithesis of what the Tea Party movement is about,”39 added Mark Meckler of the Tea Party Patriots.
Another of those grassroots activists was Orlando TEA Party organizer Phil Russo, a vocal critic who blogged about his disgust with the TPX when they first came to Orlando in November, 2009.
The Tea Party Express is being organized and promoted by a political action committee (PAC) that is not connected to the Tea Party Movement in any way. The PAC is using the emotional attachment that people have to the Tea Party name to raise funds. If they had planned this tour and called it the PAC Fundraiser Express they know very well that no one would have showed up or donated money. So, they call their bus tour Tea Party Express knowing that large crowds will turn out and people will be more willing to give money if they think that the money is going to support the Tea Party movement or candidates approved by the Tea Party movement. We in Orlando find this to be disingenuous at best and outright fraud at worst and we are not alone in our feelings. The Houston Tea Party and other Tea Party groups are also boycotting the Tea Party Express stops in their respective cities. The PAC is paying two real Tea Party leaders to be on the bus with them to lend legitimacy to the tour. Also, the local Tea Party leaders are not “planning” these events per se. Local leaders are being asked to secure locations and permits but the program is predetermined by the PAC. All the music and speakers and the message... is determined by the PAC.
When the Orlando Tea Party was contacted by the Tea Party Express about planning the stop here in Orlando... we told them that we could not in good faith ask our members and followers to attend an event that is raising funds for a PAC that will be going to candidates that are not in Central Florida and have not been vetted by the Orlando Tea Party. If we were going to hold such an event, which we would not, we would ensure that the money raised would go to candidates in Central Florida that were approved by our members and we would ensure that people donating knew to what candidates their money would go.40
Russo wasn't through with what he called the “Astroturf Express” though. A month later he was appalled at the expenses the group racked up in their visit to Orlando.
I caught a lot of hell from the AstroTurf thieves that did not like the fact that someone was telling the truth about their little scam. Well, I should have titled this blog post “Vindication” because we now have proof that I was right. The PAC that organized the bus tour published their financial records recently. Every PAC is required by law to disclose their expenses. We now know how much of your money was spent to “get conservatives elected” and how much went into the pockets of the people on the bus.
While they were here in Orlando they went out to dinner at a restaurant called “Black Olive” and they spent more than $4,000. This is for one meal!!! Another night here in Orlando the gang ate at the Citrus Club, one of the most expensive restaurants in downtown Orlando, but don’t worry they only spent $2,000 of YOUR money that night. Tens of thousands of dollars went straight into the pockets of the people on the bus, even the person who sanctimoniously told me that she wasn’t getting paid to be on the bus! Tens of thousands more of your dollars went to a consulting firm owned by one of the people on the bus.
It really makes me want to puke that these people sent out emails exploiting our attachment to the Tea Party movement and our patriotism so they could raise money and live like rock stars for a month.41
There's a lot more discord and rancor where this came from; for gosh sakes, I'm only on Chapter 3 here.
Needless to say, Russo's view wasn't a lone voice crying in the wilderness:
The president of the Greater Boston Tea Party dismissed (them) as a group of 'entertainers,' and other Tea Party activists have complained that the Tea Party Express is not grassroots.
From the perspective of the Tea Party Express, the lack of much grassroots interest and close attention may be a good thing. Grassroots supporters provide a colorful popular backdrop for (TPX) to attract media attention and collect more contributions to spend on candidates and affiliated business operations – without any pesky accountability to local leaders.42
But perception is reality in politics; in the public eye there was just enough being revealed about the TEA Party and just enough slick marketing going on behind the scenes to make it look like the TEA Party was still primarily a bottom-up organization. (A case could be made that assertion was true through the 2010 campaign. After that, as you'll find in reading on, things changed for the movement.)
In the meantime, there were smaller groups looking for their own piece of the pie. Early on, Eric Odom had founded the American Liberty Alliance (ALA), which came out of his TaxDayTeaParty.com website. Unlike many of the other TEA Party groups, it was a for-profit enterprise that, over a relatively short period, rolled over into the Liberty First PAC and by the end of 2010 morphed into a “news and activism” site called Liberty.com.43
Odom's groups, though, struggled for success. A bus tour co-sponsored by the ALA (along with another former Odom employer, the Sam Adams Alliance, and the small inside-the-Beltway group Americans for Limited Government)44 struggled to reach the finish line, losing participants and sponsors along the way.45 And Liberty.com went through a number of iterations before finally folding in 2013. (That domain name now links to an international cable and satellite TV provider.)
Another smaller entity was Tea Party Nation (TPN). Formed by Tennessee attorney Judson Phillips at about the same time as the other groups, TPN's claim to infamy was the ill-fated attempt at the first Tea Party convention in early 2010.
It's not that the idea of a more formal TEA Party meeting wasn't sound, particularly as the focus began to shift from the outdoor protests that culminated in the late-summer 9/12 gathering to the prospects for making real political change in the 2010 midterm elections. But the fact that Phillips was charging convention-goers a hefty $549 price46 to attend the event – much of which went to cover the appearance fee charged by keynote speaker Sarah Palin – didn't sit well with those who still considered the TEA Party a grassroots effort and didn't have that type of disposable cash laying around. “I'm not gonna throw my money around for that,” said one activist.47 Added RedState's Erick Erickson, “I think this national tea party convention smells scammy.”48 While the show eventually went on despite the loss of several sponsors – as well as secondary speakers Reps. Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn49 – its fallout landed Phillips in court as financial backer Bill Hemrick, a trading card magnate, sued him over Palin's fee.50 A second attempt at a TPN convention in Las Vegas, slated for the summer of 2010, never got off the ground, leaving Phillips liable for nearly $750,000 in unpaid bills and interest when the case settled two years later.51
All these groups were just beginning the fight for relevancy when the political world was shaken to its core. On August 25 the 60-seat filibuster-proof liberal majority in the Senate that the Obama administration was counting on to legislate its agenda became a thing of the past. The Lion of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, was gone.
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 http://hennessysview.com/2014/02/20/5-years-ago-today-tea-party-born-phone-call/
2 https://web.archive.org/web/20181106214214/http://www.michaelpatrickleahy.com/teapartyfounders.html
3 Ibid.
4 http://michaelpatrickleahy.blogspot.com/2009/02/tcot-and-online-conservatives-launch.html
5 http://web.archive.org/web/20090225023816/http://www.topconservativesontwitter.org/ Archived page from February 25, 2009.
6 http://web.archive.org/web/20090226031827/http://www.tcotreport.com/ Archived page from February 26, 2009.
8 https://www.cnet.com/news/barack-obama-dominates-twitter/
9 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10carr.html
10 Michael Patrick Leahy: Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement (New York: Broadside Books, 2012) p. 4-5.
11 The “official” #dontgo account made its last Tweet March 4, 2009. https://twitter.com/dontgomovement
12 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19cncodom.html
13 https://web.archive.org/web/20180426053354/https://ericodom.com/ The article in question was from December, 2017 and buried on the archived front page.
14 http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/08/24/charlatans-and-the-horse-they-rode-in-on/
15 Melissa Deckman, Tea Party Women: Mama Grizzlies, Grassroots Leaders, and the Changing Face of the American Right (New York: New York University Press, 2016) p. 57.
16 http://www.pr.com/press-release/139912
17 http://jeffrey-feldman.typepad.com/frameshop/2009/02/tea-party-republicans.html
18 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/opinion/13krugman.html
19 Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson: The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) p. 9.
20 Leahy, p. 235.
21 http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304173704575578332725182228
22
http://www.nationwidechicagoteaparty.com/
was still available when I accessed it September 17. 2017; however, by May, 2018 the site was gone.
23 Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin: Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2012) p. 18.
24 http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2009/04/09/telling-tea-party-truth/
25 http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2010/11/08/trademark-collective-marks-trademarking-the-tea-party/id=13187/
26 https://www2.gwu.edu/~action/2008/interestg08/stopobamatour.html
27 It was once at this address:
Since I began this book, it's been removed.
28 Social media conversation with Mark Williams, January 26, 2018. I lightly edited this for clarity.
29 http://www.politico.com/story/2010/04/gop-operatives-crash-the-tea-party-035785
30 https://web.archive.org/web/20100417015142/https://www.politico.com/static/PPM154_teapartyexpress041709.html It turned out they pretty much followed the outline to a T.
31 http://dailycaller.com/2013/02/12/inside-the-tea-party-patriots-plan-to-launch-a-super-pac/
33 https://twitter.com/912DC The Twitter handle has been dormant since September 25, 2009.
34 https://www.facebook.com/91209-Tea-Party-March-on-Washington-95179126183/ This was regularly updated through the 2010 edition of 9/12. There was also a 912dc.org website but it was inaccessible via internet archive.
35 http://web.archive.org/web/20020913052026/http://www.usteaparty.com/
36 https://www.c-span.org/video/?288868-1/freedomworks-rally It's a fun three hours of watching, and in my case it's not just reliving the memories but actually being able to listen to some of the speakers! Just try hearing someone from hundreds of yards away while you're taking photos for your own personal website.
37 http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/11/tea-party-goes-trial
38 http://web.archive.org/web/20091011001921/http://washingtonindependent.com/63299/tea-party-activists-reject-pac-backed-tea-party-express While the Washington Independent site is apparently history, the internet is forever.
39 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/us/politics/19russo.html
40 https://philrusso.wordpress.com/2009/11/02/the-tea-party-express-fruad/
41 https://philrusso.wordpress.com/2009/12/17/tea-party-express-fraud-exposed/
42 Skocpol and Williamson, p. 112.
43 http://www.redstate.com/erick/2010/08/24/charlatans-and-the-horse-they-rode-in-on/
44 Full disclosure: the author penned occasional op-ed columns for a subsidiary group to ALG called Liberty Features Syndicate from 2009-10.
45 Compare this archived version of the American Liberty Tour website from November 29, 2009 (http://web.archive.org/web/20091129104053/http://americanlibertytour.com/) to an earlier one from September (http://web.archive.org/web/20090927173911/http://americanlibertytour.com/). There was an issue with following the TPX too soon through some stops.
46 https://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/notes-from-the-tea-party-convention/. Kate Zernike repeated the information in her later book on the TEA Party, Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (2010).
49 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/28/AR2010012803565.html
51 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/13/tennessee-tea-party-las-vegas-hotel_n_1772497.html
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 4: What Can Brown Do For Us?
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…