DIYbanter - Unify the new American ‘tea party’? LOL..Good luck with that.

"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
...
Maybe they should go huddle in Hawaii with the other losers....the
Republicans.

Laugh...laugh...laugh....

TMT

Unify the new American ‘tea party’? Good luck with that.
An attempt to solidify the tea party movement with a convention next
month in Nashville is now looking like it could backfire. So far,
pragmatism, not party politics, has boosted the tea party’s profile.

By Patrik Jonsson Staff writer CSM
posted January 23, 2010 at 3:36 pm EST

Atlanta —
America has seen plenty of tea party protests around the country in
the last year. The image of tea party activists protesting at a major
tea party event, however, would be new.

It could happen. Some activists are panning a planned “Tea Party
Convention” in Nashville next month, saying the for-profit group Tea
Party Nation – which scored a major coup by convincing Sarah Palin to
come for a $100,000 speaker’s fee – is trying to co-opt the movement
for dubious purposes.

The blowup over the convention, which aims to bring together the
movement’s discordant voices, points to a key paradox of a liberty-
driven phenomenon that has gained surprising political capital in one
short year: Unified, it may well fail; dispersed, it could prevail.

Top-down model rejected
“The idea that there’s one person, one event, that can somehow be the
tea party spokesperson is inaccurate and counter to the movement of
free-thinking individuals that want less government intervention,”
says John O’Hara, author of “A New American Tea Party.” “This top-down
model is what’s being rejected in politics, and that you’d adopt that
for your movement is bizarre.”

The brouhaha over the Tea Party Convention notwithstanding, Mr. O’Hara
adds that he doesn’t believe that is happening with the tea party
movement.

But others are concerned. Though the victory of Republican Scott Brown
this week in Massachusetts hinged at least in part on tea party
support, it left in its wake a surprising crisis of confidence. In
short, the movement is torn between its grassroots credentials and
stepping up its game and organization to become a bigger part of the
political debate.

“At the very moment the tea party has proved itself as an undeniable
political force that must be taken seriously, it is at risk of tearing
itself apart,” writes former Congressman Joe Scarborough in Newsweek.

The convention is Exhibit 1. Conservative blogger Erick Erickson,
otherwise a tea party fan, likens the credibility of the convention
organizers to “an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks.”

Holding together a fractious coalition
“Billed as a pivot point to transition the tea party movement from a
chaotic uprising to an organized and sustainable political force … the
first-ever convention in Nashville … is instead shaping up as a
reminder of the problems inherent in holding together a fractious
coalition of local groups resistant to authority and pursuing often-
conflicting agendas,” writes Kenneth Vogel in Politico.

Mr. Scarborough, for one, says the tea party’s challenge is how to
take on entrenched political parties without a solid structure of your
own. “Riven with internal conflicts and lacking a coherent structure,
the tea party's biggest challenge may be trying to deal with its own
success," he writes.

Others worry that without some kind of a platform, the GOP – and even
Democrats – could co-opt its message. “Will tea party conservatives be
able to guide the Republican Party in the wake of [a moderate-to-
liberal Republican] being elected to Kennedy’s old seat?” wonders
Andrew Ian Dodge in the wake of Scott Brown's election. If not, he
writes, the Massachusetts election may have “split the tea party
movement so it is no longer a threat to both parties.”

But that view is shortsighted, others in the movement say. Despite
lack of structure and bureaucracy, the tea party movement has proven
to be remarkably agile, responsive, and (even by backing Brown)
powerfully pragmatic.

“There’s always this balance between staying principled and gaining
traction in the political process,” says Mr. O’Hara. “You need to get
in the game to really affect change, and a lot of times that’s going
to mean working with the Republican Party or the Democratic Party or a
third party, just making sure that whoever does get elected stays true
to the principles that this movement is trying to progress.”