Palin Assails Obama at Tea Party Meeting
By KATE ZERNIKE
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: February 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/us/politics/08palin.html?th&emc=th
NASHVILLE – As Sarah Palin left the stage at the inaugural National Tea Party Convention here Saturday night, the crowd erupted into chants of “Run Sarah Run!”
“I think you like her!” said Judson Phillips, the chief organizer of the convention, when the ovation finally stopped and people had stepped down from the chairs where they had been standing and waving flags.
Ms. Palin gave the Tea Party crowd exactly what they wanted to hear, declaring the primacy of the Tenth Amendment in limiting government powers, complaining about the bailouts and the “generational theft” of rising deficits, and urging the audience to back conservative challengers in contested primaries.
“America is ready for another revolution!” she told the crowd, prompting the first of several standing ovations.
The speech was closely watched as a potential signal of Ms. Palin’s political future and the extent to which the convention would embrace her. But Ms. Palin, while aligning herself firmly with the Tea Party, nevertheless urged the 1,100 delegates who had gathered in a hotel ballroom not to let the movement be defined by any one leader.
“This is about the people, and it’s bigger than any one king or queen of a tea party, and it’s a lot bigger than any charismatic guy with a teleprompter,” she said.
That was just one of several digs at President Obama. “How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for you?” she asked at one point. She blasted him for rising deficits, “apologizing for America” in speeches in other countries, and for allowing the so-called Christmas bomber to board a plane headed for the United States, saying he was weak on the war on terrorism.
“To win that war, we need a commander in chief, not a professor of law,” she declared.
Ms. Palin gave little hint to her political plans when Mr. Phillips, the organizer, prodded her in a brief question-and-answer period after her 40-minute speech. She said she would support those candidates who “understand free market principles” and “personal responsibility.”
Without saying which candidates she would support, she said she would campaign for conservative challengers in some Republican primaries.
“This is how we’re going to find the cream of the crop to face a challenger in the general,” she said. “Let’s not be afraid of contested primaries.”
When he asked her about the “two words that scare liberals: President Palin,” she demurred, smiling and looking to the side of the stage where she said her youngest daughter, Piper, was watching.
And pressed about the relationship between the Republican Party and the Tea Party movement, and whether the latter should become a third party, Ms. Palin suggested the two should be compatible.
“The Republican Party would be really smart to start trying to absorb as much of the Tea Party movement as possible,” she said. “This is a beautiful movement because it is shaping the way politics are conducted. You’ve got both party machines running scared.”
The convention had gathered here to try to turn the activism of the Tea Party rallies over the last year into actual political power. Her speech was the keynote event of the convention, and the big draw for many of the 600 people who had paid $549 to attend – another 500, organizers said, paid $349 just to see for her speech alone.
The convention had been a pretty sedate affair until the Palin speech, with delegates sitting through panel discussions about how to effect changes in primary elections and how to use new technology to Tea Party advantage. But by the time she took the stage after the closing dinner Saturday night, convention-goers were hungry for the red meat.
They had begun lining up outside the ballroom three hours before the speech, breaking out at one point into “God Bless America.” As Judson Phillips, the chief convention organizer, warmed up the crowd for her speech, it erupted in chants of “USA! USA!” They raised a toast to Ronald Reagan, whose 99th birthday would have been Saturday. (“To Ronnie,” said one woman wearing sequins at the back of the room.)
When Andrew Breitbart, the founder of BigGovernment.com, introduced Ms. Palin by describing her as “the first person to tell us about the death panel,” the crowd cheered.
Ms. Palin’s fee for speaking was reported to be $100,000, and she was criticized by some Tea Party activists for taking a fee, much as the convention itself was criticized for charging a ticket price that is too high for tea partiers who consider themselves fiscal conservatives. But Mr. Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, the social networking site that sponsored the convention, refused to talk about how much she was paid.
“I’ll simply say this: when you get a speaker of the caliber of Governor Palin, it’s not done on the basis of a handshake,” he said. He added that there had been a confidentiality clause in the contract organizers signed with Ms. Palin. “Contractually I’m not allowed to talk about it,” he said. “I promised I wouldn’t do it.”
And Ms. Palin said she would make no apologies for taking money and turning it back, she said, to conservative causes, though she has not specified which ones she will donate to.
“I will live, I will die for the people of America,” she said. “This party that we call the Tea Party, this movement, as I say, is the future of politics in America.”
Tea Party Looks to Move From Fringe to Force
By KATE ZERNIKE
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: February 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/us/politics/07teaparty.html?th&emc=th
NASHVILLE — Yes, there were the handful of Revolutionary War re-enactors with their powdered wigs and tri-corner hats. And the man with the T-shirt proclaiming himself a proud member of the “Tennessee MOB” — a poke at politicians who dismissed Tea Party members as an “angry mob.” And one speaker did insist that Jesus’ birth was better documented than President Obama’s.
But at the inaugural National Tea Party Convention here this weekend, gone were the placards that protesters carried last year with Mr. Obama’s face wearing a Hitler mustache or superimposed on the Joker. Gone, really, were any placards, unless you count the poster of Sarah Palin in her signature red jacket that hung from one of the wrought-iron balconies of the Opryland Hotel and Convention Center.
Organizers said that anyone “looking too crazy” would have been tossed out. They had a goal that turned out to be shared by pretty much everyone here: to turn the Tea Party into a serious political force, rather than the angry fringe group they say it had been branded as.
“The movement is maturing,” said Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, the social networking site that sponsored the convention. “The rallies were good for last year, because that’s what we could do last year. This year we have to change things. We have got to win.”
The goal is a electing a conservative Congress in 2010 and a conservative president in 2012. To that end, organizers announced the formation of a political action committee that they say could steer $10 million to conservative challengers this year.
And the convention tried to channel anger into what Mr. Phillips called “Electioneering 101.” “What we want people to do is to leave here connected with other activists so they can recruit good candidates, get candidates exposed to the voters and get voters to the polls,” he said. “If we just go out and hold signs and protest, that’s not going to win the election.”
Despite the convention and its neat PowerPoint presentations, the movement that began a year ago to protest government bailouts and health care legislation showed signs this weekend that it is still inchoate, diverse and almost defiantly leaderless.
“This movement doesn’t need a leader,” said Anthony Shreeve of the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition, which did not take part this weekend but staged a counter news conference outside. “It’s a ‘We the People’ movement.”
The Tea Party may not have a leader, but the closest thing is Ms. Palin, who capped off the convention with a speech Saturday night urging the movement to action. “America is ready for another revolution,” she declared, as the crowd stood on chairs, waved flags, and chanted, “Run, Sarah, run!”
“All political power is inherent in the people,” she declared, “and government is supposed to be working for the people, that’s what this movement is all about.”
Tea Party Nation said it had invited the chairmen of the Republican and Democratic National Committees to speak with delegates in town-hall-style sessions. Tea Party members argue that Republicans are just as complicit as Democrats in the expansion of Big Government, so perhaps neither would have felt welcome.
But organizers said they never heard back from the Democratic National Committee. And while the Republican chairman, Michael Steele, expressed interest, he later declined, citing “scheduling issues,” which Mr. Phillips called “really regrettable.”
“Are they scared of you?” asked a reporter from France, one of several foreign journalists covering the convention.
“They should be,” Mr. Phillips said.
Among those represented here were some old conservative players, like Young Americans for Freedom and Judicial Watch. But the convention was losing sponsors and participants right up to its opening day because of accusations from other Tea Party groups that Tea Party Nation, which is unapologetically for-profit, was profiteering.
In the end, Mr. Phillips said, the convention would just break even: “I keep telling people my profit’s going to be in the high two figures.”
The Unconvention
Apart from a man wearing a shirt made from an American flag, this did not have the confetti and balloon-drop feel of the typical party convention. It could have been an annual gathering of dentists or teachers (next door at the Opryland, a small planet of a hotel, was Blissdom, a gathering of female bloggers).
Delegates with nametags on lanyards browsed at campaign booths, including one set up for Judge Roy Moore, last in the national headlines for his fight to keep a monument of the Ten Commandments outside his courthouse and now running for Alabama governor. Vendors hawked T-shirts, sterling silver tea bag pendants and Tea Party coffee and tea (special convention price: $8 a bag).
For the most part, the 600 people who had come from as far as Hawaii sat in neat rows in banquet rooms, listening to panel discussions about how to build the movement and raising their hands politely to speak.
“This is a real working convention — there was nothing around tea bags and signs,” said Mark Skoda, the leader of the Memphis Tea Party, who, with his radio voice and imposing physique, had been chosen to deal with a press corps the Tea Party movement sees as less than friendly.
If Tea Party advocates offer little admiration for Mr. Obama, they do often cite his campaign as a model because of the way it built a fortune from small donations and used social networking.
But the crowd here was largely middle-aged and older, and technology may not come as easily as it did to the young adults who powered Mr. Obama’s campaign. A session on “collaboration in the cloud-applied technology” got hung up on basics like how to do an effective Google search, buy a Web domain or send mass e-mail.
Still, what delegates may lack in political savvy, they make up for in energy.
At a panel discussion titled “Defeating Liberalism via the Primary Process,” the room erupted in a standing ovation when Barbee Kinnison, a delegate from Nevada, stood up and declared her intention to unite Tea Party groups behind a candidate to defeat Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.
As the session ended a few moments later, people charged toward her to exchange cellphone numbers and pledges of support. “You need to come to California and help us defeat Nancy Pelosi,” one woman said.
The Brown ‘Earthquake’
Senator Scott Brown, the
newly-sworn-in Republican from Massachusetts, was not here, but his presence was everywhere, with his victory cited as an example of how the Tea Party could turn anger into power.
Mr. Skoda of Memphis said the energy at the march on Washington in September had excited him. “Then nothing happened,” he said. “The president sort of ignored us. That’s when people realized we had to do more.”
They got close, he said, with the special Congressional election in New York’s 23rd District, where a third-party conservative drove a moderate Republican from the race, then lost to a Democrat by a few thousand votes.
But then came what Mr. Skoda called Mr. Brown’s “earthquake,” his election to a seat that had been held by a Kennedy for nearly half a century.
“We did it without pejoratives,” he said, “we did it without name-calling, we did it without all the absurdity that one would suggest is the traditional anger of the moment. We grew up.”
A Family Affair
The enthusiasm, apparently, could be catching.
Susan and Gil Harper from Cushing, Me. — she a lawyer who telecommutes to New York, he a furniture maker — said they had limited their political involvement to voting. But the bank bailout outraged them, they said, and pushed him to attend his first Tea Party rally.
By Christmas, he told his wife he wanted a ticket to the Tea Party convention. When she gave it to him, she said she would go along, but only incognito, wearing a hat and sunglasses.
“Because of Nancy Pelosi calling people who believe in the Tea Party movement Nazis,” she explained referring to the House speaker, who actually did not call Tea Party members Nazis, but noted that some protesters had carried swastikas. “My grandfather’s family, as Polish Jews, escaped Nazism. To call us Nazis is an abomination.”
By Friday night, her head was uncovered, and her eyes were making direct, and determined, contact.
“I think she’s come out,” Mr. Harper said.
She smiled back. “I’m not wearing a hat anymore.”
Some people still can't believe that Americans of sound mind elected Barack Obama president.
BY CLARENCE PAGE
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
February 06, 2010
http://newsblogs.chicagotribune.com/pagespage/2010/02/tea-party-boils.html
Former Republican presidential candidateTom Tancredo has it figured out: We the voters are just too stupid, too ill-informed to make good choices.
That's pretty much what the former Colorado congressman told the first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville this weekend, where he lathered up the crowd with a speech that offered this reason for Obama’s election: “We do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”
Obama was elected, Tancredo said, because of "people who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English."
As a result, he told the opening night crowd of delegates, America “put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House … Barack Hussein Obama!"
Yup, that's his name. Don't wear it out.
Of course, the crowd loved it. Tea partiers may not have much of an agenda, platform, program or top-down organization, but they can work up a roomful of steamed anger, no problem.
And nobody in the crowd of 600, according to reports, seemed troubled at all that “literacy tests” were used for decades in the deep south to deny blacks the right to vote. The tests have been banned since the Voting Rights Act of 1965 Lucky for Tancredo they don’t require history tests to vote in Colorado.
UPDATE: On Friday Tancredo assured reporters he did not have any particular group like, say, black people in mind with his literacy test remarks.
Good. That's a start. Judging by some of the spelling on handmade signs I’ve seen at tea party rallies, movement members had better hope literacy tests never come back.
UPDATE: Huffington Post has close-up photos of crib notes written in Sarah Palin's left hand during her convention speech in which she mocked President Obama's teleprompter use. Maybe it's her way to conserve energy.
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