WASHINGTON — All is bleak. All is woe! I speak of the Tea Party
movement, the movement of 2009 and 2010 that was the hot news story
of those years, and led to the Republican rout of the Democrats in
2010. Now the Tea Party movement is according to reports in the
media in decline.
Was it extremist? Was it racist? Distinguished Americans like
Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton said it was. Yet their evidence when
it came under objective scrutiny kept falling apart, as so many of
their hoaxes over the years have fallen apart: Ms. Tawana Brawley,
the 1979-1980 Atlanta killings supposedly by local cops who spent
their leisure hours in the Ku Klux Klan. I cannot think of another
couple of hucksters who have adduced so much evidence of heinous
behavior by the American majority only to have the evidence go
poof! The Tea Party movement was neither extremist nor racist. In
fact, it was what Americans look like when they suddenly become
alive to politics: somewhat amateurish, terrifically enthusiastic,
and eventually quite serious about practicing the political arts at
the local level, in Madison, Wisconsin; in Waco, Texas; in Tucson,
Arizona — all locales far, far away from Washington, D.C. Though I
have reason to suspect that the Tea Partiers may return to
Washington, D.C. after the November elections. Read on.
The Washington Post related an interesting finding in
another dolorous story with hints of an obituary about the Tea
Partiers. According to a Washington Post/ABC News Poll, 44
percent of the American people supported the Tea Partiers, 43
percent opposed them. I saw polls like that going back to 2009. The
intensity of feeling against them augurs ill for the Tea Partiers,
but that does not tell us much. The newness and controversial
nature of the Tea Party movement has passed. Its members are not
much in the news today. There are other stories making headlines.
The 44-43 percent divide among Americans remains, though the Tea
Partiers get few headlines. Why?
Ned Ryun, the founder and president of American Majority, a nuts
and bolts training operation with its roots deep in the Tea Party
movement, says the movement is pretty much beyond the mass
demonstration stage in development and has gone local. Its members
are learning the art of politics and running for school board, city
council, state and national office. They are trying to replace what
they perceive as tired old hands, such as 80-year-old Senator
Richard Lugar in Indiana, with younger, more vigorous candidates
for office. They are learning to play politics seriously and their
goal is reform: balance budgets, eliminate debt, return to the
Constitution.
One of the oddest twists to the Tea Party story is the
comparison with the Occupy movement. Some utterly ideologized
observers of the political scene view the often
deranged, clearly in decline, Occupiers as a left-wing equivalent
of the Tea Party movement, and they see these pathetic waifs as
somehow auspicious — the 2012 equivalent of the civil rights
movement or a peace movement of yore. Yet the Occupiers make hardly
any effort at engaging in politics at the local level. Ryun says
his people are, and he has an active training program around the
country to prove it.
He has been criss-crossing the country in recent years running
seminars and other training sessions. They do not attract a lot of
attention in the press as demonstrations and other protest actions
do, but they matter more. They can effect real change in politics.
The American Majority has trained over 20,000 recruits as activists
and candidates. In the last two to three years American Majority
has held 570 training sessions across America on how to be
effective politically both in government operations and in running
for office. From these 570 sessions have come approximately active
2,000 candidates.
So maybe we ought not to write off the Tea Party movement just
now. The Tea Partiers not getting the press that the Occupiers are
with their Defecate for Peace movements and their public
masturbators, but they are aiming at office in November.
