Tea Party Nation: On the Movement's Rapid Rise, Protests

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By David Von Drehle

If any one person is the founder, it's Rick Santelli. A year ago, the CNBC commentator blew a gasket on the air over a plan by the Obama Administration to tackle the foreclosure crisis. Multibillion-dollar proposals were flying like snowflakes in Washington, and Santelli's rant struck a chord with people who wondered where all the money would come from. "We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party," Santelli declared, evoking the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor. A movement was born. Egged on by conservative interest groups and leveraging Barack Obama's digital-networking strategies, grass-roots opponents of the President's agenda have made themselves a major factor in U.S. politics.

Naming the Tea Party movement, however, is easier than defining it. Tea Partyism covers a lot of ground and a world of contradictions. It contains Nashville lawyer Judson Phillips, who recently organized the first Tea Party convention at the posh Gaylord Opryland Hotel, charging $549 per ticket and pocketing an undisclosed profit. But the movement also embraces the volunteers who denounced Phillips and his convention as a money-grubbing mistake. The crowd in Nashville cheered as speaker Joseph Farah demanded proof that Obama is a U.S. citizen. "Show us the birth certificate!" Farah cried. But other Tea Partyers were equally delighted when influential blogger Erick Erickson responded to Farah soon afterward by banishing "birthers" from his blog, RedState. "The Tea Party movement is in danger of getting a bad reputation" by courting conspiracists, Erickson wrote.(See TIME's photo-essay "Portraits of the Tea Party Movement.")

Whether bitter or sweetened, the tea is winning admirers. According to the latest CBS News/New York Times poll, roughly 1 in 5 adult Americans identifies with the Tea Party movement, which scored its first major victory last month when Republican Scott Brown won the Massachusetts Senate seat long held by the late Democrat Ted Kennedy. Brown's promises to bolster U.S. defenses against terrorists and block Obama's health care reforms gave him a blinding Tea Party aura, the glow of which sent fear through the Administration and fried the circuits of Congress. But you can no more trace that aura to a home address than you can pinpoint the rainbow's end. The Tea Party is not a political party, not yet, and maybe never will be. Rejecting the idea — widely held by Democrats — that a government of brainy people can solve thorny problems through complex legislation, the Tea Party finds its strongest spirit among conservative Republicans. Yet a powerful current of "blame both sides" also pulses through the movement. "We're equally disgusted with Republican and Democrat Congressmen," says Lynne Roberts, a volunteer organizer of a Tea Party gathering in Albany, N.Y. Her group is one of hundreds, maybe thousands, animated by Tea Party energy — millions, perhaps, if you count the groups of just one or two people perusing the daily news and muttering, "They've got to be kidding." (See TIME's video "Meet the Tea Party.")

Small Is Beautiful
Now those people have a sort of political home. Across the country, from Muskegon, Mich., to Wetumpka, Ala., Tea Party meetings are being convened in restaurants and living rooms and libraries and office buildings — and online. Tea Party thinking has inspired hundreds of websites and Facebook pages. Yet there is no headquarters to visit, no chairman, no written platform and no chosen candidate — although the scramble for that mantle by the likes of Sarah Palin and Representative Ron Paul is as furious as the charge for the inside track at Talladega.

Perhaps this isn't surprising. With the economy shaken and unemployment sky-high, with the federal debt mounting by the trillion as Washington politicians pay lip service to fiscal responsibility (picture a sermon on humility delivered by Shaquille O'Neal), an outbreak of outrage was inevitable. The Tea Party movement is just one expression of a vast discontent unsettling the country. Recent polls have found that two-thirds of Americans describe themselves as dissatisfied or angry with their government — a huge, not-so-silent majority that ranges from conservatives convinced that Obama is a Maoist to liberals convinced that he is a corporate tool to Obama loyalists who resent that the President is suddenly facing such a rough road. Two out of three is an ocean of unhappiness, among the highest levels on record. (See pictures of Tea Party protests.)

For Eileen Blackmer, whose Tea Party group in West Central Florida is called the Pinellas Patriots, the issue is trust. She doesn't have any left for the federal government. The answer, therefore, is a smaller government on a very short constitutional leash, with less spending and balanced budgets. Blackmer was galvanized to action by the debate over health care. "I read the entire bill, page after page after page," she said recently. "Everything's 'A committee will be formed.' We do need health care reform, but there are other things to do to control those costs. Quit making backroom deals, and let us have that transparency you keep talking about."

That trust deficit comes up in conversations with Tea Partyers everywhere. In Arlington, Va., Kevin Murphey said he would love to see a better health care system but has no confidence that the government can deliver one. "I can't trust them, and we can't afford it. They haven't proven to me that they can do anything efficient," he said. Murphey's recent Tea Party meeting consisted of just five guys in a bar, but that's not so bad for Arlington, home of the Pentagon. Protesting Big Government in Arlington is like disdaining microchips in San Jose. (See the screwups of Campaign '08.)

Smaller government is a venerable American philosophy — though one not always consistent with the public's passion for Medicare, farm subsidies, mortgage deductions, aircraft carriers and name-your-favorite-cut-of-pork. And calling forth the spirit of America's tea-dumping colonists in Boston has never been easier than it is now. One irony for Obama is that the Tea Party movement is using his own organizing techniques against him: Meetup.com announcements, Twitter tweets, viral videos, e-mail trees and all the other innovations falling under the politically potent umbrella known as social networking. Indeed, in the online age, the whole purpose of physical gatherings has changed. Real crowds draw virtual crowds, and vice versa, as David DeGerolamo, a Tea Party organizer from North Carolina, explained during a seminar in Nashville. Recounting how he built a statewide operation from scattered local groups, DeGerolamo said he started with a rally. "I went around and contacted as many of these groups as I could find and invited them to Asheville for what we called the first N.C. Freedom Convention." That was last May. When everyone was gathered, DeGerolamo coaxed the groups — notoriously prickly about their independence — to join under the banner of a single website, NCFreedom.us. Next, he convened a town-hall meeting "for one reason — to get YouTube videos," DeGerolamo said. "YouTube is one of our best allies in terms of becoming a communications network." Today, DeGerolamo's group sends out more than 6,000 e-mails a week, stages informal protest parades called Rolling Tea Parties and posts dozens of videos of the movement in action.

The rapid rise of Tea Partyism has derailed much of the Democratic agenda in Washington, cuing a chorus of intramural recriminations and setting off a string of congressional retirements. With Brown delivering the 41st vote to sustain a threatened Republican filibuster in the Senate, health care reform may be on ice until next year. Another signature Obama initiative, capping carbon emissions, is snowed under. The House blames the Senate, the Senate blames the House, and both chambers point accusing fingers at the White House. Obama, meanwhile, is struggling to find a tone of voice that resonates in Tea Party America, alternating chords of raging populism and calm centrism, sometimes both on the same day. (See 10 elections that changed America.)

But Democrats are not the only ones rattled. Tea Partyers are boosting former Republican state legislator Marco Rubio's challenge to Governor Charlie Crist for the GOP's U.S. Senate nomination in Florida. In Arizona, the movement is targeting Senator John McCain, whose willingness to compromise on issues like immigration makes him vulnerable to former Representative J.D. Hayworth in the primary. Indiana Republican Dan Coats, a former Senator, is itching to get his job back after the retirement of Democrat Evan Bayh. But he too hears rumblings on his right. It is the sound of Tea Partyism on the march.

The Three Flavors of Tea
Is anyone organizing all this? Or trying to? Tom Jenney is the Arizona state director of a Washington-based group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a low-tax, libertarian advocacy group funded primarily by the wealthy Koch family of Wichita, Kans., and its foundations. With its sister organization FreedomWorks — run by former House majority leader Richard Armey — the AFP nurtured the Tea Party movement in its early days, offering training and logistical support. When Santelli sounded his trumpet, Jenney organized the first Tea Party protests in his state. But the larger the movement has become, the less sway professional organizers have, Jenney told TIME. "We've done quite a bit of coaching. At the same time, a lot is self-done with these groups that are largely organized on the Internet," he said. "For example, the Tucson Tea Party folks are very independent. They have knocked out one city councilman and now want to recall the governor and two other city-council members." The old line about herding cats comes up repeatedly when Tea Partyers describe their movement. The Gadsden flag — "Don't Tread On Me" — is an unofficial emblem. But hard as the movement is to pin down, certain strands of thought keep turning up when Tea Partyers gather.

See more about the Tea Party.

The first is an explicit rejection of progressive philosophy. Until recently, progressivism was stowed on a dusty shelf of history, but many Democrats now embrace the label in place of the term liberal. It's an apt adoption. Like many Democrats today, the progressives of a century ago believed in the ability of social-science-minded intellectuals to analyze civic problems and engineer a way for government to tackle them. Tea Partyers say that belief, an integral part of the Obama team's mind-set, is crazy, even dangerous. They believe problems are better solved by individual efforts than through government programs. And they are suspicious that the real point of progressivism is not to solve problems but to concentrate power. No matter the crisis, whether it's a terrorist attack or a bank failure, they like to note, the government always gets bigger. "I'm not sure exactly why, but [Obama's] into this progressive movement," said Martin Michaels at an evening event in Rochester, N.Y. A silver-haired man dressed in biker gear and an unprintably anti-Obama T-shirt, Michaels added, "I don't think Obama's looking out for freedom, for the people."(See who's who in Barack Obama's White House.)

A second recurring note is darker. Like many other populist movements in American history, Tea Parties have become magnets for conspiracy mongers and nativists. Nashville conventioneers roared their approval when former Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo blamed Obama's election on voters who can't speak English. Because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country," Tancredo declared, Americans "put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House ... Barack Hussein Obama" — with an ominous emphasis on the President's middle name. Perhaps the most talked-about book of the convention was The 5,000 Year Leap, by the late right-wing writer W. Cleon Skousen, which argues that the Founding Fathers set up the U.S. on firm Christian bedrock and designed the Constitution to maximize individual liberty and free enterprise. Speaker after speaker commended the volume, a favorite of Glenn Beck's, and though it is far from Skousen's most extreme statement, with Skousen, even the mild stuff is controversial. A proponent of the idea that Wall Street bankers are plotting to replace the Constitution with a new world order, Skousen roamed so far beyond the fringe that his own Mormon church distanced itself from his work and the thoroughly conservative magazine National Review described him as an "all-around nutjob."

A third strand of thinking is more prosaic and might feel familiar to survivors of politics of the early 1990s. That too was an era of deep divisions and wildly swinging opinion polls: Obama's recent roller-coaster ride is nothing compared with the 50-point plunge in George H.W. Bush's ratings as he approached his re-election campaign. Then, as now, the culprit was a sour economy, but the voice of indignation came not from TV ranters but from a Dallas billionaire. H. Ross Perot catalyzed an anti-incumbent, back-to-basics, pox-on-Washington movement that is the spiritual ancestor of today's Tea Parties — right down to the hand-painted placards and the occasional powdered wig. Suzanne Curran, a Tea Partyer from Virginia, sounded as if she had stepped out of a time machine straight from a Perot rally when she said recently, "It's time that we speak up — we the people. We are the employers. All these elected reps are the employees. And we need to stop calling them officials, giving them more credit than is due them." (See pictures of the Tea Party tax protests.)

Yet it's striking that the Reform Party, founded by Perot to keep his crusade alive, has virtually no appeal to the Tea Party crowd. There is a lesson in that. Grass-roots uprisings come and go, and protest candidates rise and fall. In the flush of righteous battle, people focus on the beliefs they share and tolerate points of difference. Eventually, though, the battle ends, the smoke clears, and even when the movement has some success, its troops tend to go their separate ways. After Perot retired from politics, his movement fell to pieces; Patrick Buchanan carried the Reform Party's banner in one election, and Ralph Nader did so in the next, which makes about as much sense as a radio station alternating between hip-hop and harp music. Building an enduring party that is able to outlast leaders, heal divisions, withstand opportunists and adjust to changing times turns out to be extremely difficult.

And that's fine with Joe Conard, a Tea Partyer in Scottsdale, Ariz., wearing wire-rim glasses and toting a sign that says "Stop Socialism Now — No Government Health Bill." Conard is fed up with political parties and has no interest in starting another one. "Don't call me a Republican. I am an independent thinker against Big Government," he said. "The Tea Party movement isn't a party at all. I'd like politics without parties."

George Washington wanted the same thing, but history went in another direction. It gave us Democrats and Republicans, and we're likely to be living with them for a long time to come. What the Tea Party movement tells us, though, is that the hold those traditional parties have over politics is never as tight as their leaders would like to believe, and that in times of trouble — times like these both R's and D's are well advised to be afraid. Very afraid.

— With reporting by Jay Newton-Small / Nashville; Sam Jewler / Arlington; Kevin O'Leary / Scottsdale; Sophia Yan / Albany; and Wendy Malloy / Pinellas Park