Tea party ignites passions
Written by admin on March 18, 2010 – 5:27 pm -..
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Newly energized activists revel in their role as agitators
By Steve Law
The Portland Tribune, Mar 18, 2010, Updated Mar 19, 2010 (18 Reader comments)
Americans for Prosperity members on Saturday protest Democrats’ plans to expand health-care insurance. The protesters rallied outside Democrat Kurt Schrader’s Congressional town hall meeting in Oak Grove.
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Democrats dismiss them as cranky right-wingers and nut cases. Libertarians hail them as new recruits to the cause.
Republicans view them — sometimes warily — as a force to be harnessed to help reenergize the conservative movement.
They’re participants in the local “tea party” movement, a motley mix of new political activists and longtime true believers in limited government.
Some are passionate and unsophisticated, learning politics on the fly. Many are fired up by right-wing talk show hosts. Others are mobilized by national groups with a libertarian, pro-corporate agenda — such as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks.
Many were spurred to action — or seized a political opening — after the U.S. financial system sputtered in September 2008, and the panicky Bush and Obama administrations responded with an extraordinary series of corporate bailouts and stimulus spending programs. Tea partiers’ angst about the sagging economy, mushrooming budget deficits and government interventions was further stoked by President Obama’s ambitious plans to expand health coverage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite minimal funding and mainstream media attention, the local tea party movement has mobilized thousands of residents to protests at Pioneer Courthouse Square, Beaverton, Oregon City and elsewhere. The movement captured the media spotlight with last summer’s raucous disruptions of congressional town hall meetings.
Hundreds are now attending monthly chapter meetings of Americans for Prosperity, the Oregon 9-12 Project and other groups nurtured by the tea party upsurge. Many of the local activists filed to run for political office in Oregon’s May 18 primary, several of them for the first time.
Here are some of the key players and issues in the local tea party movement:
• Blogger turned state tea party leader
Geoffrey Ludt was an armchair activist until early last year.
The 37-year-old West Linn resident regularly offered his slant on current events on blogs and Twitter posts — earning enough of a following to be listed among the Top Conservatives on Twitter.
Then Seattle blogger Keli Carender organized the nation’s first tea party protest on Feb. 16, 2009, in Seattle. Three days later, CNBC cable TV commentator Rick Santelli took to the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade. In a live broadcast, he ranted against newly inaugurated President Barack Obama’s mortgage bailout proposal and called for a Chicago tea party protest.
Ludt soon joined a conference call with other Top Conservatives on Twitter to plan a national series of protests the following week.
On Feb. 27, Ludt showed up at Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square with a bullhorn and a pitchfork, but no permit. He was escorted off the square — no pitchforks allowed. But Ludt and 100 or more people moseyed across the street to resume their protest on the Pioneer Courthouse steps.
Locally and nationally, the movement went viral, egged-on by conservative radio and TV hosts and bloggers. FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity joined the bandwagon, supplying money, paid organizers and volunteers.
Ludt put together an Oregon Tea Party Web site and coordinated larger statewide protests on April 15, the federal income tax filing deadline.
Crowd estimates vary widely, but Ludt says 5,000 people showed up at Pioneer Courthouse Square that day, plus hundreds more at 17 other Oregon tea parties.
Ludt, while earning a living in workplace safety and bookkeeping, now serves as the volunteer state coordinator of the Oregon Tea Party. He calls it a “diffuse, leaderless organization” of like-minded individuals and groups, modeled after the “open activism model.”
Under the tea party banner, various groups cooperate to mobilize protests, such as last Saturday’s march outside the town hall of U.S. Rep. Kurt Schrader, D-Canby, to protest the Democrats’ health insurance bill.
Tea party groups consciously stick to a fiscally conservative message against government bailouts, bulging budget deficits, and government intervention in the economy. Sometimes their demands dovetail conveniently with the agendas of their corporate funders.
Tea parties steer clear of social issues — such as abortion and gay marriage — so they can attract a broader following, regardless of party affiliation.
Most tea party-affiliated political candidates in Oregon are running as Republicans, but the relationship to the party is complicated. The GOP is joined at the hip with religious social conservatives, and some of its corporate donors and interest groups “may not be aligned ideologically with the tea party movement,” Ludt says.
“We want the party to be more aligned with us,” he says, rather than bending the tea party movement to fit the GOP. “I’m really ideologically driven,” Ludt says, adding that he “bristles” at the idea of being a loyal party member.
Some of his own views might not be so palatable in the Oregon GOP. In an ideal world, Ludt says, each state would be “sovereign,” with the federal government mainly providing national defense.
While the mainstream media mostly ignored the tea party movement until last summer’s raucous congressional town hall meetings, Taft has been there since “day two,” Ludt says. During the Feb. 27, 2009 protest in Portland, Taft says she leaned over to Ludt and said the two of them had to organize a much bigger protest for April 15.
Taft broadcast her radio show live from Pioneer Courthouse Square on April 15, as the movement demonstrated its newfound muscle with protests around the country. “That was the fifth-largest in the nation,” Taft says. “Something’s happening here.”
She regularly uses her airtime to promote tea party events, much as Fox Network commentators do nationally.
Taft says the decentralized nature of the movement is a strength, and she resents accusations that protesters are taking marching orders from Republican organizations.
Ordinary people are worried about being “enslaved” with debt from the bailouts and stimulus spending, Taft says, and the “diminution of freedom” from Democrats’ plans to expand health insurance and enact a cap-and-trade system to counter greenhouse gas emissions. “That would be command and control over every aspect of their lives,” she says of cap and trade.
Taft insists she’s never been a registered Republican, yet she doesn’t see much potential in mounting a third-party movement. “We need to impose our values on the Republican Party, or any party that will have us.”
Taft says she’s working on another big protest in Portland this spring, but it won’t be a tea party.
“I think people are beyond tea parties right now.”
• The gay Libertarian
Marc Delphine left the Republican Party years ago because he couldn’t understand how people espousing limited government could work so hard for laws denying gay rights and banning abortion.
He’s the local tea party movement’s gay Libertarian.
“I believe that government is force,” Delphine says. “It’s in bed with big business.”
Delphine likes the tea party movement’s push for smaller government and its avoidance of social issues. He also likes its potential.
The Sherwood resident, who also serves as vice-chairman of the Oregon Libertarian Party, organized the April 15 tea party protest at the Beaverton Izzy’s Pizza, and was astounded when hundreds of protesters showed up. Most had never been involved in politics before, he says.
Delphine is no newcomer to the cause. He ran for the Legislature in 2004, 2006 and 2008, and expects to get this year’s Libertarian nomination for the U.S. Senate seat held by Portland Democrat Ron Wyden.
Americans for Prosperity, the largest group in Oregon that latched onto the tea party movement, recruited Delphine to lead its Washington County chapter in late 2008. Then Ludt recruited Delphine to organize the Beaverton tea party rally last April.
Delphine says the movement has its share of “radical crazy freaks,” such as those drawing Hitler mustaches on Obama posters. He likens it to flamboyant gays who once garnered negative publicity during gay-pride marches.
Most tea partiers are really rather “mild-mannered” people, he says, who are willing to attend rallies or protests when called together.
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