Posted on 01/07/2012 9:30:30 AM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
TAMPA - Two years ago in the midterm elections, the Tea Party dominated the conversation -- and the results at the polls.
But this time around, with the presidency at stake, the Tea Party is making very little noise. And that's making some people wonder if the Party's over.
With Sarah Palin at the helm, and a legion of newly energized voters, the Tea Party wielded enormous clout in 2010, sending favored sons and daughters like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Nikki Haley of South Carolina to Congress.
The defeats of Sharon Angle and Christine O'Donnell show that they didn't bat 1.000, but in this election cycle, the Tea Party seems to be riding the bench.
Less than 30 days from the Florida primary and Tampa Tea Party leader Sharon Calvert is still undecided.
"There is no candidate, at least at this point, that the Tea Party appears to have coalesced around," said Calvert, though she did have a favorite.
"I was behind Herman Cain."
And therein lies the problem. Candidates most favored by Tea Party voters, including Herman Cain, Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, are either out of the game or losing badly. Ron Paul, fairly or not, is widely considered unelectable as a Republican. And Tea Party members have serious issues with the current front runner, Mitt Romney starting with "Romney care" enacted during his term as Massachusetts Governor.
The Tea Party fervor has died down for other reasons. Their chosen gubernatorial candidate in 2010, Rick Scott turned out to be a historically unpopular Governor. The galvanizing issue of high speed rail is dead, and though the national debt is still a hot issue, Creative Loafing political writer Mitch Perry believes the Occupy Wall Street movement has helped call attention to other issues including corporate influence and income inequality.
"It's not all about cutting the deficit and the debt. That's still an important part of it, but it's broadened out and the Occupy Wall Street movement has had a significant affect on the discourse if nothing else they've done so far" says Perry.
Unless some third-party candidate comes forward, it's all but certain that the Tea Party will rally around the eventual Republican candidate in the interest of unseating President Barack Obama.
They still don’t get it.
Let them think so. Most are quietly working in Republican ranks.
They’ve only been writing this line for the past three years. The White House really needs to hire a more talented headline writer that the “independent” press can use as the verbatim template for their stories — this is getting old and repetitive.
“Nikki Haley to Congress”, huh?
That is so incredibly incompetent...
They still don’t get it, do they? LOL. Let them think we’ve gone away. It’s called a “Silent Majority” for a reason.
The Tea Party guys that got elected sorta forget why they were elected in the first place. Hussein still gets what he wants but I understand they have written a few letters using all caps.
Boehner still cries, McConnel caves, hussein gets what he wants. Nothing changed.
The article doesn’t get it, but the tea party does seem to be MIA on the issue of corruption in government, pork, bailouts, national debt etc. Just saying ‘smaller government’ is not enough in terms of messaging. People need to hear the words:
No bailouts
No subsidies
Cut the pork
No whining
There is NO candidate out there who is sending this message.
This says to me that no candidate is connecting to the tea party and the masses of disaffected voters out there who would identify with the above message.
No, they just don’t ‘get it’........I’d be damned if I ascribed to one of the umpteen “formal” Tea Party PACs, organizations, or self-professed conglomerations one can find on the internet today - I get emails from them all the time, which I IGNORE.
The “Tea Party” isn’t an organization, it isn’t a PAC, nor is it a formal movement. It is a loose, yet resolved, connection of citizens that are pissed off at Obama Government, period! That is an ATTITUDE, and it will translate to abject failure of our Halfrican President. We don’t need a ‘party’ affiliation to affirm this. We only need vote, come November! Throw out the Halfrican!
Well... DeMint, Cain, Rubio, and Palin’s failure to endorse a fellow conservative so far is not helping the Tea party movement much.
Aside from the errors in the article (Nikki Haley...Congress?), my feeling is that there were a lot of Tea Party adherents who were somewhat libertarian, and they have all gone to Ron Paul and are preparing to go third party with him.
In my town in Florida, many of the people who were affiliated with Tea Party movement had Ron Paul bumperstickers left over from the last election. After the first couple of well-attended Tea Party events, attended by a wide range of conservatives in general, this group went off to try to form their own libertarian-leaning party and claimed ownership of the Tea Party (which was just a set of ideas, not a party). It didn’t work, but they seriously disrupted the GOP as a party and I think they actually ended up undermining conservative power in the institutional party.
Well, Obama is the 25 meter target to be sure, but the Tea Party is about much more than getting rid of the socialist in chief.
Of course, Brown just came out in support of Obama over the unconstitutional non-recess appointment of Cordray. But, hey, Scott likes the perks in Washington, and he wants to keep his job in the upcoming election -- so pissing on the Constitution and supporting the Kenyan usurper just makes sense.
Tea Party? Maybe it still exists in the heartland, but it ain't in Washington DC.
I agree - I get those mailings too, and they irritate the heck out of me.
I don’t need to give my money to an unproven, self-claimed Tea Party organization to do my part to get rid of that Muslim.
Strange. I don’t see any mention of Rick Santorum. Surely an oversight, or maybe they think he’s dropped out. I’m sure there’s a good reason, since this is obviously a very well connected and informed writer who’s absolutely up on all the latest stuff. It is strange, tho, that he didn’t mention the person who’s gonna win this thing, with Tea Party support (just my opinion).
No kidding the conservative base wasted nearly months on end flirting around the disastrous candidacies of Bachmann, Cain, Perry, etc. as the ever-changing anti-Romney hero of the week, while the real Romney just keeps plugging along. Now they leave us with the ‘choice’ of Romney or Santorum. Thanks for nothing. Another evaluation of the hand wringing and moaning coming Wednesday after he takes New Hampshire by a commanding lead.
Even if Huntsman is not down the line Tea Party conservative on social issues, whatever, that means, he still has a record where it counts of conservative, free-market, small-government revolution that no Tea Party member could help but applaud. Go Jon !
MIA?
Hell no, we’re just resting up for this coming summer.
Plus, I think Lorainne got it right when she wrote “..no candidate is connecting to the tea party..”
Hey 2VD, did you get ANY sleep last night? I was up at 3:00 a.m. and saw you were posting at 4:00!
Ya, I noticed that right off the bat too.
Nikki Haley was elected governor of South Carolina, not elected to Congress.
Does anybody proofread these news articles nowadays, for glaring factual errors such as this????
“They still don’t get it.”
You got that right! I took the day after election day 2012 off, as I fully intend to spend the following day watching the news media go over the ubiquitous WTF moments from election night.
Tea Party gone. No, no, we’re here. Right here!
They have no idea!
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