Former Republican vice presidential
candidate and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin endorses Republican presidential
candidate Donald Trump during a rally at Iowa State University on Tuesday, Jan.
19, 2016, in Ames, Iowa.
Always a bit of a rebel, Debbie
Dooley was so frustrated in 2009 over bank bailouts and stimulus packages that
she threw herself into organizing Atlanta’s first tea party rally. Today, the daughter of a Southern
preacher has shifted her energy and passion into electing Donald Trump as
the latest Washington outsider to shake up the status quo.
No matter that many of Trump’s
policies stray from the tea party’s original small-government ideals. The
tough-talking billionaire ignites that same anti-establishment fervor that
fired up many tea party foot soldiers like Dooley.
In the process, Trump has recast
their earlier champions, namely tea party darling Sen. Ted Cruz, as
disappointing outsiders-turned-insiders who cater to corporate donors and fail
to deliver on big promises.
“The support for Trump is not only a
screw-you to the Republican establishment, it’s a screw-you to the conservative
establishment,” said Dooley, 57, an energy consultant. “People are sick and
tired of the same old, same old — just money corrupting the political
process. They work hard, they vote for elected officials and they expect them
to keep their promises.”
Trump’s candidacy has not only fractured
the Republican Party,
it’s threatening to break apart the tea party movement and erode a
once-powerful voting block that has driven conservative politics and elections
for the past seven years.
Andrew
Breitbart warned conservatives about Trump, but he never saw this coming. In addition to grass-root defections by activists like
Dooley, tea party leadership has split over Trump’s presidential bid. Some
conservative activists met this week to try to stop him, while others have
joined his campaign.
Meanwhile, major financial backers,
including groups funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, have been sidelined
from publicly backing GOP primary candidates, partly out of fear they might
alienate their divided base.
The soured relationship should come
as no surprise. The tea party was always somewhat of a marriage of convenience
between Washington’s free-market powerhouses and frustrated ordinary Americans
who showed up at rallies with their tri-cornered hats and “Don’t Tread on Me”
flags.
Fighting President Obama provided an
easy alliance that Republicans at first leveraged to their advantage. But it
also was a relationship built on what now looks like a rickety foundation
— less about think-tank-driven policies and more about voter outrage
against perceived elitism.
From an ideological standpoint, the
tea party’s natural candidate should be Cruz, the Texas senator who was swept
into office in the tea party revolt and wears his unpopularity in Washington as
an “outsider” badge of honor.
But in Trump’s long shadow, Cruz and
rival Sen. Marco Rubio,
before he left the campaign, suddenly looked to many rank-and-file activists as
part of the problem.
“I don’t see Ted Cruz being a job
creator,” Dooley said. Trump’s positions against free trade
and his reluctance to slash entitlement spending have led policy purists to
call Trump a RINO — Republican in Name Only.
David McIntosh, the president of the
free-market Club for Growth, which is running anti-Trump TV ads in early voting
states, noted that the businessman often portrays himself as outside of the GOP
establishment.
“Trump is a huge wake up to the
senior Republican leadership of the party,” McIntosh said, adding that the GOP
should do more to embrace conservatives if it wants to prevent further tea
party defections to Trump’s campaign. “We have to make the tea party a
part of the Republican coalition,’’ he said. “We can’t take them for
granted."
But at Trump rallies, a growing
number of former tea party activists see him as their new hope, noting that
Republicans have failed to repeal Obamacare, stop illegal immigration or scale
back Obama’s domestic spending programs.
“We’ve given the Republican Party a
chance,” said Amy Kremer, a founding tea party leader who now backs Trump.
“They would have never taken the House without the tea party. We gave them the
Senate. What have they accomplished? They haven’t accomplished a damn thing.”
The most high-profile splits are
between original tea party leaders like Kremer and Jenny Beth Martin, who were
part of that first tea party in Atlanta and who went on to help form Tea Party
Patriots.
Forget
comparisons, Trump's bombastic showmanship is in a league of its own Martin, who now runs the group, is backing Cruz. “For
our organization, it hasn’t just been about anger, it’s a set of
principles,” Martin said. Also aligned with Cruz is Christine O’Donnell,
an early Sarah Palin-backed
Senate candidate in 2010 perhaps best known for a TV ad declaring she was not a
witch.
Palin, however, has endorsed Trump,
as has Kremer, who previously helped elect Cruz but now is working at a
pro-Trump super PAC with Jesse Benton, a former top aide to another tea party
favorite, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky.
Trump’s national spokesman, Katrina
Pierson, shows the elasticity of tea party loyalties with one of the most
circuitous routes to her new boss. She was a Democrat who voted for Obama
before becoming a Dallas tea party leader backing Cruz. Then she switched to
Trump after the senator introduced her to the billionaire, according to
reports.
The shifting alliances leave the
impression the tea party is no longer a coalition joined by a common refrain
— Taxed Enough Already — but silos of think-tank wonks, big-business
conservatives and angry white voters who don’t speak the same language.
Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a libertarian advocacy group formed
by leaders of an earlier Koch-backed enterprise, said the split doesn’t signal
the end of the tea party as much as “an evolution of it.”
Regardless of who wins the
presidency, he said, the rise of Trump and Cruz — the two most outsider
candidates of the primary cycle — shows the tea party’s influence on the
GOP.
“The one thing that comes out of
this: The Republican Party is a smoking crater on the ground,” said Brandon,
who in his spare time is a Revolutionary War reenactor. “The tea party has won.
Now the bifurcation is: Do you want
a burn-it-down with Donald Trump or do you want a battler like Ted Cruz.” Added Martin: “It shows, this
movement, seven years and three weeks old, is picking the presidential nominee
on the right. That’s a big deal.”
But FreedomWorks and other big
conservative players — Tea Party Express, the Koch-backed Americans for
Prosperity and Heritage Action — are all sitting out the presidential
primary.
Virtually none of them attended a
meeting of conservatives last week in Washington trying to plot an anti-Trump
effort. Some prefer to focus on congressional races or state issues. But they
also risk losing influence among their members if they back the wrong
candidate.
The high-dollar donors at the Koch
organization’s winter meeting preferred Rubio, while activists voting in a straw
poll at FreedomWorks’ conference in Ohio this month overwhelmingly backed Cruz.
“We just don’t dive into a primary
of this magnitude and try to dictate,” said a person within the Koch network
granted anonymity to discuss. “It would harm the willingness of a lot of people
to work with us. ... It would harm our long-term effectiveness.”
That’s fine with Dooley, who said
she’s fed up with both the GOP establishment and big-dollar Washington donors
telling people what to think.
“They look down their noses on
average people in the grass roots,” she said. “They think they’re the only ones
who can define conservatism.”
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-trump-tea-party-divide-20160318-story.html
Comments
The Big
Money that permeates to GOP Establishment is poison and not suitable as
medicine for the US economy. Most Tea
Partiers supported Ron Paul in 2012 and were inclined to support Rand Paul and
Ted Cruz because of their sky-high Constitutional voting scores. But we all knew they could solve some of the
problems in our economy by closing unconstitutional federal departments,
agencies and programs, but the main driver of the Jobs Recession is Excessive
Immigration and excessive deference to the UN and .
When
Trump hit the scene funding his own populist campaign against bad trade deals,
excessive immigration and banning Muslim immigration, we knew we had a
spokesman. When he called global warming
a hoax and killed political correctness like Roundup, we knew we had our man.
In the
meantime, Jenny Beth Martin and the other half of the Tea Party made a wrong
turn and opted for Cruz. We left Cruz
for good when Rubio dropped out and Cruz became the GOP Establishment
candidate.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
No comments:
Post a Comment