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.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Sarah Palin addressed the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville on Saturday. More Photos »
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
One speaker was Andrew Breitbart, a conservative Web publisher and former Drudge Report editor. More Photos >
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.
Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
Affectations from the Revolutionary War era were not out of place at the National Tea Party event. More Photos >
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.”
New York Times
