Chapter 7: The Fleeting Taste of Success
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.
“They say that the US Senate is the world’s most deliberative body. Well, I’m going to ask them to deliberate upon this: The American people are unhappy with what’s going on in Washington. Eleven percent of the people approve of what’s going on in Congress.” - Rand Paul in his victory speech, November 2, 2010.
It was understandable that establishment Republicans inside the Beltway groused about what the TEA Party did not provide – that being a majority in the Senate – but this overlooks the overall results of one of the largest wave elections in history and how much it aided the GOP.
Looking at the six who succeeded in crashing the Senate – John Boozman of Arkansas, Dan Coats from Indiana, John Hoeven of North Dakota, Ron Johnson representing Wisconsin, Mark Kirk taking Barack Obama's old Illinois seat, and Pat Toomey succeeding turncoat Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania – all of them took former Democratic seats in the process, some of which had been so for decades. (Boozman's Arkansas seat had been a Democratic stronghold since Reconstruction.) Most of them could credit the TEA Party for their success, at least to some extent. But TEA Party hearts were most sent a-patter by two Senate candidates who kept Republican seats but promised to shake up the way the staid body was run, especially since neither were candidates preferred by party brass when their campaigns began.
When Kentucky's aging, ailing, and increasingly unpopular Jim Bunning finally decided to call it a Senate career, many assumed Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson would become the state's next Senator. All that stood in the way, it seemed, was the candidacy of an ophthalmologist by the name of Rand Paul.
We first met Rand back in Chapter 1 when he was a speaker at the 2007 Boston Tea Party fundraiser for his father's 2008 Presidential campaign. Given the family heritage, it was no surprise that Grayson backers and establishment Republicans in Kentucky, including Senator Mitch McConnell, attempted to paint Rand as an extremist for his libertarian-shaded view of conservatism.1 But in an election year defined by a movement that stood for limited government and fealty to the Constitution, there was no doubt Paul's message was going to find a receptive audience in the Republican camp – so he handily defeated Grayson in the primary by double digits.
Far from what passes for the big city in Kentucky in Louisville, and away from the state capital in Lexington, Paul stood at a country club in his hometown of Bowling Green (population at the time: 58,067) and told an exuberant gathering of supporters, “I have a message from the Tea Party; a message that is loud and clear and does not mince words: We have come to take our government back."2 His Democratic opponent would be the state's Attorney General, Jack Conway – so Rand was up against another candidate who had ran for and won statewide office on a previous occasion.
When Rand's father ran for President his candidacy was regarded as more of a curiosity among Republicans and few people took it seriously because, to be brutally honest, there was next to no chance he was going to win as a complete political outsider with little name recognition outside his Texas district and the small percentage of libertarian acolytes scattered nationwide. But once Rand won the Senate primary, in a state that had reliably elected Republicans since the Clinton era despite a Democratic advantage in voter registration – well, both the establishment and media were scared out of their wits. Democrats immediately tried to take advantage of that, with DNC Chair Tim Kaine claiming, “ordinary Americans are unlikely to be receptive to extreme candidates like Rand Paul in the general election this November.”3
Immediately Rand was pressed hard on the libertarian end of his beliefs, with the first controversy coming out days after his primary win but stemming from the pre-primary endorsement interview he did with the Louisville Courier-Journal. In that interview, Rand told the editorial board he doesn't like the idea of telling private business owners how to run their businesses,4 and the comment was uttered in the context of a discussion on the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Once he won the primary, it became a hot topic for interviews on National Public Radio and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, along with numerous media reports.5 Eventually Rand's campaign clammed up toward the mainstream media altogether, much to the chagrin of the press.6 Then again, the media portrayal of Rand's supporters (and TEA Party regulars in general) as “a bunch of gun-totin', Bible-bangin', anti-Semitic racists”7 wouldn't make for a warm and fuzzy relationship with reporters, would it?
While the media was tut-tutting Paul's beliefs, many fellow TEA Party members believed they made perfect sense from a Constitutional, limited government standpoint. “Whether a sign is on a door or placed in a window doesn’t change the heart of the man who owns the restaurant,” said Florida TEA Party organizer Robin Stublen to The Daily Beast. “And first it’s one thing, but now the government is telling me how much salt I should eat or whether I can have soda – why don’t they just come in and burp me after dinner?”8 Added Memphis TEA Party organizer Mark Skoda, “There is no place for racism in the TEA Party.”9 Skoda may have insisted the truth, but the narrative had long been set, as detailed elsewhere herein.
Another problem besetting Paul's campaign soon after the GOP primary: a schism with the actual Libertarian Party in Kentucky that briefly made it appear the Libertarians would run a candidate for the seat.
Rand had “gone from being an outsider candidate to a tea party candidate to an establishment candidate in the past nine months," complained Kentucky Libertarian Party Vice-Chair Joshua Koch, who was a former Paul volunteer. “It's a complete identity crisis,” he added, calling Paul and Democratic candidate Jack Conway “faces of the same bad coin.”10 Koch may have been frustrated with Rand Paul and wanted an opponent for him, but state Libertarian Party Chair Ken Moellman quickly insisted that, despite the fact “Rand Paul is not a libertarian,” they would not run a candidate against him.11 That turned out to be a reasonable choice.
Later in the summer, reporter Jason Zengerle, writing at GQ, dug up what became known as the “Aqua Buddha” incident12 – a college prank from Rand's days at Baylor University that the Huffington Post breathlessly expanded on to claim the victim (who said Paul and his companion in the incident “never hurt me”) was “ABDUCTED.”13 Rand's experience at Baylor was itself a little controversial in that he only attended the school long enough to pass the MCAT and move on to Duke Medical School, where he eventually graduated. To say he was a non-comformist at Baylor may be an understatement, but thousands of young men and women finally grow up after their college years.
The “Aqua Buddha” incident became important again late in the campaign. Fresh off a Conway campaign commercial that portrayed Rand as being soft on crime – thanks to two-year-old statements taken out of context14 – the Democrat was finally beginning to close a long-standing persistent polling gap with Paul. So Conway doubled down with another commercial revisiting “Aqua Buddha,” a decision which was widely panned15 and eventually cost Conway the seat, according to a Democratic analysis of the Kentucky race.16 Apparently the fact Jack Conway couldn't separate himself very far from Barack Obama's record had nothing to do with his defeat, despite the fact he skipped out on attending a visit by Vice-President Joe Biden to Louisville citing “scheduling conflicts”17 but heartily welcomed the far more popular Bill Clinton to the state.18
In any case, it was the TEA Party favorite Rand Paul who defeated a young up-and-comer in the Democrat ranks who tried to run as a moderate and away from Barack Obama. Score one for the good guys.
Similarly, most figured in the early stages of the 2010 campaign that incumbent Florida Republican governor Charlie Crist would be an easy victor. Crist, who was forgoing a re-election bid to the governor's office for a second try for a Senate seat – ironically to succeed his former campaign chief of staff George LeMieux, who Crist appointed when Senator Mel Martinez resigned 18 months out from the end of his term – was described in a New York Times piece detailing the Florida Senate race early on as a “governing pragmatist who was once seen as a winner who could reclaim the political center for Republicans...a popular governor with crossover appeal among Democrats and independents.”19 Often departing from Republican orthodoxy to embrace liberal policies such as allowing felons to vote or Barack Obama's “cap and trade” idea, Crist was reviled by those Floridians who were beginning to organize into the numerous local TEA Party chapters springing up across the state. Coincidentally or not, the timing of their rise was perfect for Marco Rubio's nascent Senate campaign.
So while pundits dismissed the chances of the Speaker of the Florida House – after all, how many people in any given state know who the speaker of their House is, let alone his or her politics – the various TEA Parties began to consider the more conservative Rubio as their Senate choice. But there were other factors at work that made Rubio more palatable to the establishment Republicans once the groundswell of support began to coalesce behind him.
The first and foremost factor aiding Rubio was his backstory: he was a first-generation American, the son of Cuban immigrants who both toiled in working-class jobs to assure their children would succeed in life. Marco did just that – attending college on a football scholarship, graduating with bachelors' and law degrees, and eventually serving his fellow citizens through politics. Having photogenic good looks and a young family didn't hurt, either.
But there was more than that: for a Republican Party that was seen as the bastion of old white people, Rubio was a person of color who they could show as a new face of the party. It didn't take long for the Left to begin calling Rubio the “Republican Obama,”20 although his policies were generally in direct opposition to the President's. In that respect, Rubio could very well serve as a bridge between the GOP establishment which would be calmed because he had nearly a decade's worth of political experience under his belt in the state legislature, working his way up the ranks to become speaker over the last few years, and the TEA Party, which would be pleased with the more conservative political philosophy Rubio exhibited.
As Rubio's popularity grew and the Florida Senate race became more national in scope, Crist realized his path to victory was no longer going to run through a Republican Party that was taking a hard turn to the right. “It's never been about doing what's easy,” said Crist on his decision to withdraw from the GOP race and run as an independent, adding, “I am aware that after this speech ends, I don't have either party helping me.”21 Once up by 30 points in the GOP polling, Crist had fallen 20 or more points behind Rubio amongst Republican voters and his last chance was making it a three-way general election race pitting him against Rubio and presumptive Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek, a four-term Congressman from the Miami area leaving the House to try and move up to the Senate.
Yet while the path to the GOP nomination was being cleared for him by Crist's exit, Rubio's relationship with the TEA Party was showing signs of strain. A Republican debate on Fox News Sunday in March, 2010, several months before the primary but a month before Crist withdrew, featured an unusual question for Rubio: “Ask Marco Rubio why he refuses to be vetted by the Florida Tea Parties. I want to hear from Rubio or I will not vote for him.”22
To be sure, Rubio's campaign was a mere footnote until the time Senator Jim DeMint took notice of it. But the June, 2009 endorsement from DeMint and the Senate Conservatives Fund seemed quixotic at the time – an aide to one Crist-backing Senator noted, “When you have all the Senate GOP leaders standing behind Crist, and he has Jim DeMint, it only reinforces this idea that this isn’t a serious primary. He’s only appealing to the far right of the party, and that’s reflected in low poll numbers.”23 It was that DeMint endorsement, though, that enabled Rubio to leverage support from people sympathetic to the TEA Party from around the country, which built upon itself into an unstoppable force that went beyond the parochial concerns of some of the state's TEA Party leaders. Not even six months after that unnamed, hapless Senate aide dismissed Rubio's chances, Marco Rubio and Charlie Crist were tied in the polls. By the time Rubio got the blessing24 of the TPX in April, the race was all but over as Crist was on his way out.
Thus, it could be safe to say Rubio wasn't the same shining TEA Party star in his home state of Florida as he may have been on a national scale. Certainly he was the most conservative of the three remaining major candidates in the Florida Senate race, but the fact that Marco had a legislative record that could draw ire and concern from some quarters (unlike Rand Paul, who had the purity of no voting record thanks to having never held political office) left a nagging question about the amount of local TEA Party enthusiasm there was for Rubio. Fortunately, the polls during the final weeks of the campaign projected fairly smooth sailing for the Republican as Crist and Meek were splitting the liberal and moderate vote.
The only true challenge Rubio could have faced is one that turned out never to be – but not for lack of trying. Seeing how a similar tactic worked in New York's 23rd Congressional District the year before against a similar conservative insurgent, former President Bill Clinton secretly worked behind the scenes to get Meek to withdraw in the campaign's final days and endorse Crist so as to build his chance of winning, but Meek resisted.25 (As the election turned out, it would have been possible for such a coalition to win for Crist, but he would have needed a highly unlikely 95% of the Meek vote to do so.)
Rand Paul and Marco Rubio were the first case studies of how to use the broad support of the TEA Party nationwide to overcome hurdles in both the primary and general elections and hold Republican seats at a time when they needed to build back toward the majority while trying to push Congress in a more conservative, Constitutional direction. Add to that success a number of first-time winners in the House, and Republican party leaders should have been pleased with the results.
Success didn't just come with these candidates, though. As the TEA Party movement continued to evolve from localized, loosely organized groups that had a wide range of goals in mind for governance to more of a political machine, the Tea Party Patriots (TPP) and Tea Party Express (TPX), which began to take lead roles in the summer of 2009, consolidated their positions at the top of the TEA Party food chain. However, the TPP organization, which remained active as the umbrella group for the hundreds of local TEA Party chapters that were still making their own way, was still in its phase of not formally endorsing candidates or fundraising on their behalf at that time. Their success was more behind the scenes, and they were carefully trying to avoid being too partisan in their operations – a tension that would result in personnel issues not long down the road.
It was around this time as well that the large mega-rallies of 2009 began to fade into distant memories. Certainly there were smaller repeats of the Tax Day rallies in 2010, but the groups working within the realm of the TEA Party rally a year earlier such as FreedomWorks, Americans for Prosperity, the Campaign for Liberty, and so on had taken the e-mail listings they gathered over the period when people were most passionate and tried to keep the fires going in the far easier manner of stoking them through e-mail appeals. Obviously there was no shortage of scary subjects to feature in the subject lines.
In other instances, however, local Republicans and/or support groups like AFP just tried to “hijack and crush” local efforts. A good example: Shelli Dawdy of Nebraska complained vehemently when their local AFP and Republican Party tried to merge their Tax Day 2010 festivities with her Grassroots in Nebraska organization. “When we organize a Tea Party,” wrote Dawdy, “we will abide by the no political party, no politician policy we’ve had since the beginning.”26 Rules like that didn't sit well with groups that coveted the TEA Party's passion and activism.
A couple of the larger groups also borrowed an idea that became the new trend in TEA Party rallies, first brought to us by the TPX.
From a humble beginning and ambitious goal of concluding their cross-country journey at the 9/12 Rally in Washington D.C. barely a year earlier, by November, 2010 the Tea Party Express had grown to the point that by the time the election had concluded, it had wrapped up four nationwide bus tours which included over 150 different stops in 40 states. About the only region of the contiguous 48 states it had missed in making its stops was the mid-Atlantic south of Washington, D.C.
In its first two tours, the TPX seemed to intentionally attempt to cover as much of the country as possible. (However, my lobbying for a local Delmarva stop didn't bear fruit.)27 Its first effort, which started in late August and indeed finished September 12, began with a sendoff from their Sacramento home base and zigzagged across the mid-South and Midwest over the next 2½ weeks on its way to Washington.28 Just six weeks later they were at it again, but this time with a title (“Countdown to Judgment Day”) on a trek that would take them up the west coast, through the northern plains, and eventually down to the Deep South and Florida over a nineteen-day run.29
Reconvening for the spring of 2010, their third edition, dubbed “Just Vote Them Out,” crossed the country from Harry Reid's Nevada to Washington just in time for a Tax Day anniversary TEA Party, but it spent a solid week in the Midwest – a region especially hard hit by the Great Recession. In Michigan alone the TPX made 10 stops over parts of four days, with some being proverbial “whistle stops” but others set up to be full-fledged rallies.30
Lansing TEA Party organizer Joan Fabiano rode along for part of the Michigan journey, which she claimed was originally targeted at Congressman Bart Stupak. Stupak, it should be noted, was the pro-life Democrat who received a promise from Obama that the Affordable Care Act would not fund abortions via a future executive order – however, just days before TPX 3 came to Michigan Stupak announced he would not seek re-election.
During her ride, Joan asserted that she “asked a lot of questions” but in the end called it “a moneymaking system for the organizers,” who were in it more for themselves than the local TEA Parties. She did note, however, that those TPX stops were a great place to meet like-minded people.31
At the end of that third journey, the TPX revealed what it called its 2010 “target list” of candidates they were both supporting and working against, with one surprise being it was a bipartisan support list thanks to the inclusion of one Democrat. The idea, said TPX chief strategist Sal Russo, was “rewarding our friends and punishing our enemies.”32 Among that list of “friends” were Senate candidates Sharron Angle of Nevada, Chuck DeVore of California, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania. House members on the “friends” list were Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Tom McClintock of California, Walt Minnick of Idaho, Mike Pence of Indiana, Tom Price of Georgia, and Joe Wilson of South Carolina. Of those on the “friends” list, all except Minnick were Republicans.
For a final push before the 2010 election, the TPX put together its fourth nationwide tour, “Liberty at the Ballot Box.” True to their word, four initial stops in Nevada were placed to support their endorsed hopeful Sharron Angle against the TPX's number one enemy, Senator Harry Reid, while another on the enemy list from their home state of California, Senator Barbara Boxer, had three California stops placed for her. But GOP Senate hopefuls got a lot of independent support: there were dates for them in Arkansas, Kentucky, Missouri, two in Illinois, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Connecticut, and New Hampshire.33 Out of those twelve, seven were successful – eight of thirteen if you count John McCain in Arizona, who had two TPX stops and probably didn't need or want them. Whether the TPX was of much assistance or not to the winners can be debated, but it probably didn't hurt to have a more or less reinforcing message.
The success of the TPX can be measured in just how many groups tried to emulate its success with bus tours of their own, with mixed results.
Just a couple days before the TPX arrived at the 9/12 rally, a coalition that included Eric Odom's American Liberty Alliance, the Sam Adams Alliance, American Majority, and Americans for Limited Government began their own cross-country bus tour, the American Liberty Tour, which included appearances from Samuel Wurzelbacher (a.k.a. “Joe the Plumber” of 2008 campaign fame), Erick Erickson of RedState, and frequent TPX performer Lloyd Marcus. Intended more for being “on the ground organizing the grassroots” than for rallying interest, the tour ended up being a one-off deal.34 (It even impersonated the TPX to the point of starting from Sacramento like they did.)
On the other hand, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) took the bus tour concept to a different level. While a given AFP tour didn't have the star power or promotion that the TPX tours did, and was often limited to a particular subject – for example, an earlier rendition from 2006 was called the “Ending Earmarks Express” and focused on pork-barrel spending – the repetition (and focus-grouped, slick packaging)35 made bus tours like the 2010 “NOvember is Coming” affair very successful for AFP.
Even the Left stood up and took notice as they defended the proposed Affordable Care Act and other socialist policies with their own bus tours. The Obama front group Organizing for America toured with the message “Health Insurance Reform Now: Let's Get It Done”36 to create a “person-to-person, neighbor-to-neighbor, friend-to-friend conversation” even if attendees weren't quite certain about the message they were supposed to receive.37 More clear with their message was the AFSCME union, which had their own “Highway to Health Care” jaunt to combat the “venom and misinformation” they claimed Obamacare opponents from the TEA Party were presenting.38
Issue advocacy groups were getting in on the act as well. The Susan B. Anthony List, the pro-life flip-side to the pro-choice EMILY's List, put together a modest bus trek through the Congressional districts of six Democrats who claimed to be pro-life but voted for Obamacare.39 The prospect of the “Votes Have Consequences” tour may have upset Democratic Indiana Rep. Joe Donnelly so much that he had to reiterate, “Since coming to Congress, I have been a tireless advocate for the unborn, and my voting record reflects this.” This after debuting an ad where he claimed he “don't work for the Washington crowd,” in a race where he was up 17 points at the time.40
Joe Donnelly survived the 2010 massacre of “blue dog” Democrats in the House by the skin of his teeth, winning by just 2 percent over his GOP challenger. He'll have a cameo as the book goes on because of his involvement in a future race, but overall that summer and fall of 2010 was perhaps the most exciting time for a politically attuned conservative, Constitutionally-minded American since the upstart Ronald Reagan presidential campaign of 1976 against appointed incumbent President Gerald Ford.
As time has passed since the heady days of 2010, though, a sober assessment of the TEA Party after that election would lead one to conclude that the TEA Party only succeeded in re-centering the political landscape after it tilted wildly to the left in 2006 and 2008. Of course, it also could be argued the reason we were back to the center was that the TEA Party was just as extreme to the right as the Obama administration was governing to the far left. Furthermore, states this line of argument, the reason so little gets done in politics these days is that neither the so-called progressive, Indivisible movement on the left nor the TEA Party on the right will give an inch to compromise and get things done. Naturally, the true believers and organizers within the TEA Party thought their side had compromised more than enough over the last century or so, particularly with respect to following the Constitution, and that's the reason America is in its present condition.
Furthermore, the TEA Party proved themselves more than willing to put in the time and effort for change, as Michael Patrick Leahy wrote in the wake of the 2010 elections:
This significant political victory (in 2010) was the result of two years of tireless work from hundreds of thousands of volunteers, many of whom spent during that time anywhere from $1,000 to $20,000 of their own money on travel, organizational materials, press release fees, and the like. On average, these volunteers devoted between ten and fifty hours a week to the cause, and this includes those who had full-time or part-time jobs.
The Tea Party movement, among its supporters, has redefined the concept of citizenship, specifically by increasing the amount of time, money, and other resources citizens should consider it to be their duty to devote to political engagement. The change, quite simply, involves an order of magnitude.41
So TEA Party regulars were ready for a sea change in American politics when the 2010 election results came in. Unfortunately, that's not the reception they received:
(W)ithin a week of the 2010 midterm elections, the conservative chattering class had already broken the Eleventh Commandment (and at least one of the original ten) by openly deriding the Tea Party movement. All three legs of Reagan's coalition – along with a few extra – were broken off and aimed at us.42
This concept of fealty to Constitutional principles was quite the departure for the Republicans, who were at the time less than a generation removed from the days when genial old Bob Michel was the loyal but hapless Minority Leader, a real-life Washington General who could perhaps work around the edges a little bit on legislation to make it less damaging but in reality was just part of the problem. It took the bomb throwing of Newt Gingrich to make Republicans relevant again on a legislative level, and TEA Party regulars fondly remembered the way Gingrich engineered the previous Republican wave election at the 1994 midterm – just like 2010, that balloting was the reaction to a President who lurched too far to the left and enjoyed the honeymoon of a Congress which gave him pretty much everything he wanted.
But over time, the ways of Washington held sway with the “Contract With America” GOP majority, too. Gingrich was forced out due to recurring scandals both personal and professional less than five years after becoming Speaker, spending edged back up under the Republican George W. Bush, and 2006 brought the whole charade crashing down on the Beltway GOP. Four years later the TEA Party played a major role in what could be considered the “broken window” theory of Republican politics because they essentially put the Republican Party back to where it was a decade earlier – perhaps not in raw numbers, but in the sense of being able to control legislation. Problem was, the House could pass all the legislation it wanted but those bills would be filed in a desk drawer someplace in Harry Reid's office and willing accomplices in the media would give the 112th Congress its reputation as a “do-nothing Congress,” particularly blaming the House for the troubles.
Some significant portion of that inertia, though, came from those who were supposedly on the TEA Party's side. Imagine this scene: after winning a resounding election, you come to the political table and take your seat, only to find out those already sitting there don't want the time of day from you. This is how the leadership of the Tea Party Patriots recounts their meeting with House Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner in the days leading up to the 2010 election, a point when it looked like a majority was within reach for the GOP:
Just prior to the historic 2010 election, we met with then minority leader (John) Boehner in his large, ornate Capitol Hill office. Members of the Tea Party Patriots had asked us to meet with him to let him know what was expected if and when the Republicans took the majority. Surrounded by multiple staffers with pens and pads at the ready, we sat down with Boehner and delivered a very simple message from the Tea Party Patriots.
Our members had voted and they expected “bold” and immediate leadership on the budget. They wanted an immediate return to fiscal responsibility. They wanted the soon-to-be-Speaker to propose a return to the spending levels of the last budget under President Clinton, a time when the budget was balanced and there was a surplus.
Upon hearing this plan, Boehner threw his head back and laughed a deep and resounding laugh. As he regained his breath, he smiled a condescending smile, took a deep draw off of his cigarette, and with the smoke wafting out of his mouth, said, “Well, that sure is bold!” We knew at that moment exactly what to expect from the incoming Republican majority leadership.43
So the TEA Party had to defend not only what would become a limited and spotty record of legislative accomplishments with their people in charge, but also deal with some of the struggles and foibles of people who were considered its leaders.
I touched on the Mark Williams “We Coloreds” incident a couple chapters back, but the way it perpetuated the “racist” narrative was instrumental in how the TPX handled a key Congressional race. (Williams, you may recall, was the Sacramento radio host turned Tea Party Express spokesman.) In July, 2010 Mark's reaction to reports that the NAACP adopted a resolution which, as originally introduced, decried “the racism of the Tea Parties”44 was widely panned as prima facie evidence for the Left's case. Of course, for years the NAACP has been considered a lapdog for liberal causes in general and the Democratic Party in particular, so such a resolution shouldn't have been unexpected.
Remember that the TPX had on its original list of endorsed candidates for the 2010 election a “Blue Dog” Democrat, Rep. Walt Minnick of Idaho.45 Although it was later claimed that Minnick “was never entirely comfortable”46 with the TPX endorsement that came out a few months earlier, the satirical letter Williams wrote as a blog post – a missive that eventually led to his resignation from the TPX a few days later47 – gave Minnick the excuse to disassociate himself from the group, hoping it would see “the error of its ways” in its not rebuking Williams.48
As for the TPX, they indeed rectified their error – but not as Minnick may have preferred. In mid-October, three months after the Williams incident, the group stated Minnick “has engaged in a pattern of behavior which shows he is more responsive to the Democrat Party's establishment than he is the voters of Idaho,” adding that he “declined” the TPX endorsement “after receiving significant pressure from the Democratic Party's leadership.” They switched their backing to the Republican in the race, Raul Labrador,49 50 and it's quite possible the late switch may have cost Minnick his seat: although the Idaho-1 race was lightly polled, Minnick was leading in the last two polls taken prior to the election.51
While Mark Williams was a TEA Party leader who occasionally made headlines because of his outspoken nature as a broadcaster, my guess is that, if you were to go back to 2010 and ask the average Joe the question: “who's the leader of the TEA Party?” Williams would not have been the number one answer. More likely to be the chief among them, thanks to her name recognition as the most recent Republican vice-Presidential candidate and sitting Governor of Alaska, was Sarah Palin.
Of course, Palin wasn't one of those who was out there in early 2009 organizing her local Wasilla community into its own TEA Party. Whether she was consciously doing so or not, though, Palin's outspoken nature and continual criticism of the Obama administration made her the face of the movement. Felicia Cravens, the founder of the Houston Tea Party Society, conceded as much: “(Palin) certainly has sucked up a lot of the oxygen in terms of the national conversation,” said Cravens in a local news interview. This didn't come without its drawbacks, though, as Cravens quickly added, “Once you've allowed someone to personify your group, you end up with a limitation on you that you can't really escape.”52
But that limitation didn't seem to stop the people from coming out in droves to see her whenever she made a public appearance (such as for the TPX), nor did any of the many candidates running as adherents to the TEA Party fail to make a big deal of it when a Palin endorsement put his or her campaign on the map, giving it a TEA Party seal of approval. (Two examples were insurgent conservative Republican candidates from my adopted home state of Maryland: Brian Murphy for governor53 in 2010 and Dan Bongino for Senate54 in 2012.)
“Teavangelical” author David Brody described it this way:
(Sarah) Palin has given herself the mission of finding the best and brightest candidates out there and then putting her neck on the line for them. And her Teavangelical pedigree really shines through when it comes to deciding which candidates to back. Typically, she chooses those who espouse Tea Party values and are pro-life. Hence, she is choosing many Teavangelical candidates.55
Palin, though, became a victim of her own success. Lampooned by the Left for her mannerisms and dragged through the mud by the media because of issues with her family, her selection by John McCain to balance out the 2008 GOP ticket as the more conservative of the pair spelled the end of her active political career in the sense that her outspokenness and fame made her a target. Her resignation announcement from being governor came, ironically, at a time when the TEA Party was beginning to flex its muscles, and perhaps should have been a warning of what would be to come for its leaders:
Political operatives descended on Alaska last August, digging for dirt. The ethics law that I championed became their weapon of choice over the past nine months. I've been accused of all sorts of frivolous ethics violations, such as holding a fish in a photograph or wearing a jacket with a logo on it and answering reporters' questions. Every one of these, though, all 15 of the ethics complaints have been dismissed. We have won, but it hasn't been cheap. The state has wasted thousands of hours of your time and shelled out some two million of your dollars to respond to opposition research and that's money that’s not going to fund teachers, or troopers or safer roads.
And this political absurdity, the politics of personal destruction, Todd and I, we're looking at more than half a million dollars in legal bills just in order to set the record straight. And what about the people who offer up these silly accusations? It doesn't cost them a dime. So they're not going to stop draining the public resources, spending other people's money in this game. They won't stop.
It’s pretty insane. My staff and I spend most of our day – we're dealing with this stuff instead of progressing our state now.56
The fact that she quit as governor, regardless of the reasoning, would be the cudgel those on the Left beat her with. Regular people, though, still loved her in the days and months following her resignation as she wrapped up work on an autobiography and starred in her own cable TV series, not to mention frequent media appearances as a commentator. But there came a point where Palin got a little bit overexposed, the issues with her family began to resemble those of the Kardashians, and it was around that time when Palin thought better than to have a future in governing, closing the door on a 2012 Presidential run.57 “I believe that at this time I can be more effective in a decisive role to help elect other true public servants to office – from the nation’s governors to Congressional seats and the Presidency,” said Palin, which has led to turns as a PAC organizer for SarahPAC, valued endorser, and political “mama grizzly.” The luxury of writing in hindsight, however, is that I know I'm getting a few months (and couple chapters) ahead of my story.
So we know the racist narrative that was present early on in the treatment of the TEA Party from the mainstream media continued apace during and beyond the 2010 campaign. But in addition, as Sarah Palin found out first hand, there was more scrutiny and investigative press against the TEA Party opposition – which couldn't even get a scrap of its cherished legislation passed – than there was coverage of the sitting President and his many questionable acts, not to mention his history and upbringing. In that respect, those in the mainstream media (defined at the time as pretty much everyone except for Fox News, the Washington Times, conservative talk radio, and various bloggers and websites) were more than happy to parrot the party line of Barack Obama's words and White House spin.
Governing was always going to be the hard part, and it was even more difficult with the headwinds buffeting the TEA Party's ship of state.
Notes - bearing in mind some of these links may now be dead ones:
1 http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/13/the-son-also-rises/
2 http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1990183,00.html
4 This would continue while in office, as Rand Paul remained an outspoken opponent of the minimum wage. See https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/rand-paul/2014/04/28/rand-paul-west-end-knocks-minimum-wage-hike/8421717/
5 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rand-paul-under-fire-for-comments-on-race/
6 http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2010/10/rand-paul-kentucky-media/#
7 Ibid.
8 https://www.thedailybeast.com/rand-pauls-civil-rights-controversy
9 Ibid.
13 https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/09/rand-paul-abducted-female_n_675766.html
15 https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/aqua-buddha-ad-backfires-044222
16 http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/130545-menendez-aqua-buddha-ad-a-killer-for-conway
17 https://www.politico.com/story/2010/06/conway-will-miss-biden-louisville-event-039042
18 http://www.kentucky.com/news/local/education/article44053263.html
19 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazine/10florida-t.html
20 https://newrepublic.com/article/73299/the-republican-obama
21 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/29/AR2010042904884.html
22 http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/marco-rubio-s-tea-party-problem
23 https://www.politico.com/story/2009/06/senator-endorses-crist-opponent-023754
25 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/us/politics/29florida.html
26 http://stubbornfacts1776.com/tea-party-hijack-by-gop-and-afp-in-progress-in-lincoln-nebraska/
27 http://monoblogue.us/2009/12/09/message-to-tpx3-dont-forget-delmarva/ Unfortunately, they did forget us.
28 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/161/tour-schedule-tea-party-express-i
29 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/164/tour-schedule-tea-party-express-ii
30 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/169/tour-schedule-tea-party-express-iii
31 Telephone interview with Joan Fabiano, February 25, 2018.
33 http://www.teapartyexpress.org/171/tour-schedule-tea-party-express-iv#more-171
35
https://roadtorepeal.org/
This is a good example of how AFP markets its efforts.
36 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/30/AR2009083002654.html
37 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/health/policy/03bus.html
38 https://www.afscme.org/news/press-room/press-releases/2009/afscme-highway-to-health-care-tour
39 https://www.sba-list.org/suzy-b-blog/votes-have-consequences-bus-tour
41 Michael Patrick Leahy: Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement (New York: Broadside Books, 2012) p. 261.
42 Mark Meckler and Jenny Beth Martin: Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2012) p. 64.
43 Meckler and Martin, p. 75.
46 http://idahofreedom.org/minnick-rejects-support-of-tea-party-express-over-racial-letter/
48 https://www.politico.com/story/2010/07/minnick-rejects-tea-party-endorsement-039929
52 http://abc13.com/archive/7704738/
53 http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/04/palin-endorses-murphy/
54 http://monoblogue.us/2012/08/20/bongino-gets-key-endorsement/ Little-known fact: the aforementioned Brian Murphy is the one who sprang nationally-known politico Dan Bongino on the political landscape as his initial supporter.
55 David Brody: The Teavangelicals: The Inside Story of How The Evangelicals and The Tea Party are Taking Back America (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012) p. 139.
56 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/us/politics/04ptext.html
Next Tuesday will continue my series with Chapter 8: Managing the Decline.
In the meantime, you can buy the book or Buy Me a Coffee, since I have a page there now. And remember…
Great work. Thank you.