Party of the People
Meet the key personalities who are building the tea party movement into the most dynamic and influential political force in modern times.
Rick Santelli had no clue he was about to deliver “the rant heard ’round the world.”
In retrospect, the events of Feb. 19, 2009, were surreal, the CNBC business editor says.
“It was very similar to a lot of my early-morning hits going back for years . . . so no, I would have never expected that one would have been the type of lightning rod it turned out to be. Not in my wildest dreams,”he tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview.
Santelli, a meat-and-potatoes guy who has ridden the same commuter train into the Windy City for 31 years to do the job he loves, reporting from the Chicago mercantile exchange trading floor, was ready at 8:35 Eastern time that morning when history’s little red tally light flickered on.
He unleashed a jeremiad that sparked a political grassfire that continues to alter the landscape of national politics.
For starters, he decried the Obama administration’s plan to modify mortgages. Bailing people out of mortgages they couldn’t afford in the first place just promoted more “bad behavior,”he said.
Behind him on the exchange floor, staffers began cheering. Santelli asked whether they wanted to help pay their neighbors’ mortgages. In response, they booed like angry fans at a ballgame.
Then Santelli uttered the words that will live on in infamy, or honor, depending on your point of view.
“We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July,”he said. “All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I’m going to start organizing.”
After his segment ended, he took a little walk, as is his custom, “looking at some of my charts, getting ready for my next spot, not thinking much of it.”
His diatribe had lasted less than five minutes, but that was enough.
“All of the sudden, my BlackBerry literally started to go off like a Las Vegas slot machine,”Santelli recalls. “And it pretty much didn’t stop for about 72 hours. I am not kidding. It was the most unbelievable thing.”
CNBC began repeating the clip. Soon it was posted on YouTube and went viral.
“I would say within about 25 minutes after I finished the rant,”he says, “all of the sudden I sensed that something had really happened that was big.”
How Santelli’s tirade electrified the grass roots is just one of many fascinating tea party stories that largely have gone untold. In the movement’s early days, there were rallies that nearly failed to materialize, unlikely bystanders who became tea party heroes, and radicals on the left who converted to join the patriotic grass-roots conservatives.
Still, the movement’s most interesting chapters may lie ahead: There are indications it has achieved critical mass and could deliver a decisive blow in the midterm elections. High unemployment and the legislative maneuvers used to pass healthcare reform are fueling the fire.
Media Criticism
The White House seemed to sense a threat immediately, on Feb. 19, reacting like an amoeba poked with a pin. The day of the rant, two top officials visited CNBC to defend administration policies. The next morning, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs used Santelli’s name six times. Politico labeled the remarks “unusually personal.”
“I’m not entirely sure where Mr. Santelli lives or in what house he lives,”Gibbs huffed, apparently aiming to characterize Santelli as a fat cat. “But the American people are struggling every day to meet their mortgages, stay in their jobs, pay their bills, send their kids to school.”
Initially, the media appeared to be more interested in criticizing the dissent than covering it. Matt Lauer’s on-air interrogation of Santelli on the Today show was so one-sided that MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan came to Santelli’s defense, pointing out that he was really just promoting “behavioral economics 101.”
By then, BlackBerrys and cell phones were buzzing all over the place. High-tech conservative sites around the country with arcane names such as TCOT, DontGo, and Grassfire.org were on fire. “Our networks just went bonkers,”Matt Kibbe, CEO of the conservative FreedomWorks organization, tells Newsmax. “I mean, all of this anger was out there. There were a lot of organizations out there, but all of our activists, they started posting Santelli’s rant.
“And within 24 hours, we had put up a little website, IamWithRick.com. And it just exploded.”
Michael Patrick Leahy, the founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter (TCOT), tells Newsmax: “Literally that very next morning I had four or five direct messages from people on Twitter saying, ‘Hey, let’s hold another conference call. Let’s do something about this.’”
Leahy, who is also co-founder of the popular Nationwide Tea Party Coalition, is credited widely with being the very first activist to press for an actual tea party protest.
But he says that his idea emerged from a collaborative process among grass-roots conservatives.
“I knew if we could pull off a simultaneous, nationwide event, the likelihood that it would catch fire was very high,”he says.
The day after Santelli’s verbal fusillade, conservative activists logged onto a conference call that included Leahy and other movement leaders such as Eric Odom, Jenny Beth Martin, Mark Meckler, and Stacy Mott. They agreed to organize simultaneous rallies around the nation. Ordinarily, convening so many events in such a short time frame would be impossible.
Their goal was to host events in 20 cities, drawing 10,000 attendees. “We ended up with 51 cities and 30,000 people,”Leahy says. “I mean, it just took off.”Clearly, the rant heard ’round the world had grazed a raw nerve in many American voters. In the months ahead, the response would make life miserable for the likes of President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Further momentum flowed into the movement when former Majority Leader Dick Armey, the chairman of FreedomWorks, became its de facto spokesman. Armey, a former college economics professor who went on to represent Texas in Congress, teamed up with House Speaker Newt Gingrich to lead the Contract with America revolution that swept through Congress in 1994. Armey proved to be the movement’s ideal figurehead, using his gift for interesting sound bites to promote the tea party’s objectives of greater liberty, lower taxes, and smaller government. Of course, the success of the Feb. 27, 2009, tea party event was just the beginning. It led to the first Tax Day Tea Party, on April 15, which drew 1 million attendees to events in more than 900 cities across the nation.
Having been unable to stifle the movement’s birth, the Obama administration’s next tactic appeared to be to ignore it, hoping it would just go away. On April 15, 2009, the White House issued a statement that Obama was “unaware”of the rallies — some of which occurred just a few blocks from the White House.
Democrats’ awareness level rose sharply, however, during the nation’s sweltering summer of discontent over healthcare reform. Activists crowded into town hall meetings around the country, making their voices heard.
The only thing that expanded as rapidly as the tea parties: misconceptions about them. Some of those myths, debunked with facts, include the following:
Myth: The tea party is mostly a bunch of men.
Fact: A March 2010 Quinnipiac poll found that 55 percent are women gravely concerned about the future of their families.
Myth: Tea party members are poor and uneducated.
Fact: In an April 2010 CBS/New York Times poll, 20 percent of tea party members reported a household income of $100,000 or more, compared with 14 percent of non-tea party members. Seventy percent of tea party members have at least some college-level education, compared with 53 percent of non-tea party members.
Myth: Tea party people are virtually all Republicans.
Fact: An April 2010 Winston Group poll showed that 40 percent of tea party members identify themselves as either Democrats or independents.
Myth: Most Americans don’t like what the tea parties stand for.
Fact: Voters responding to a survey said, by a 48 percent to 44 percent tally, that the average tea party member has views on major issues closer to their own than President Obama, according to a Rasmussen Reports analysis in April. Congress fared even worse: 47 percent to 26 percent.
Myth: Tea partyers are all white.
Fact: The April Rasmussen poll found that 20 percent of tea party activists do not identify themselves as white, and 6 percent identify themselves as African-American. That’s approximately the percentage of blacks in the overall U.S. population. The prominent roles played by African-Americans in the movement, including the Rev. C.L. Bryant, entertainer Lloyd Marcus, and Project 21’s Deneen Borelli, reflect the movement’s ongoing effort to diversify.
More convincing than the polls in debunking the misconceptions are the tea party activists’ accomplishments.
They helped elect Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia, and played an important role in turning Ted Kennedy’s seat into Scott Brown’s seat in Massachusetts. They also fell just one Bart Stupak short of derailing the president’s controversial healthcare reforms. That is an amazing track record for a movement the White House had scorned as out of touch with ordinary Americans.
Improving Perceptions
This year’s Tax Day Tea Party illustrated how much the young movement had matured in such a short time. Suddenly, it seemed, the cable networks couldn’t imbibe enough tea.
They practically welcomed Dick Armey back to town as returning royalty.
“Oh, it’s so good to see you again!”chortled a CNN field producer who greeted Armey on April 15 as he stepped out of his car and onto the National Mall.
The producer gushed over a previous Armey interview she described as “one of my most favorite interviews my entire life.”The effusive CNN producer stopped short of asking Armey for his autograph, but a lot of the sign-waving tea party members did just that. One even asked him to sign the shirt on his back — while he was wearing it.
Looking fresh off the ranch in boots, black jeans, a denim shirt, a black suede jacket, and, of course, his trademark Stetson, Armey and CNN’s John King began strolling shoulder-to-shoulder, circumnavigating the Washington monument as two cameras taped them having what looked like a cordial chat.
How would Armey define success for the tea party in the coming midterms, King wonders.
“If in fact, there is a successful coalition between the Republican Party and the grass-roots activists towards the electoral outcomes in November,”Armey says, “then the first obvious test of success would be the Republicans in the majority.
“We will look at that new Republican majority and say, ‘All right you guys, you won yourself a chance for a beginning. You stay true, we’ll continue to work with you and be supportive of you.
“‘But if you start drinking backsliders’ wine, you are going to find out that you have a very, very unhappy group of grass-roots activists.’”
A pause in the taping to avoid filming a row of portable toilets in the background gives one tea party activist in the crowd a chance to heckle King.
“Talk about RINOs, what a fake tea party you are,”the sign-waver yells at King. “Last year, ‘Oh the tea party’s a joke.’ Now look at you, Anderson!”
King, it seems, occasionally is mistaken for Anderson Cooper, the CNN host who disparaged tea party participants by labeling them with the sexually derogatory “tea bagger”name. Cooper is not the tea partyers’ favorite cup of tea, to put it mildly.
The heckler’s remarks reflect the perception of tea party members that the same media personalities who voiced skepticism or even derision about the movement a year ago now are jostling for face time with tea party leaders.
Tobe Berkovitz, a communications and politics professor at Boston University, says that, as the tea parties grew — by some estimates their numbers now exceed 15 million members — their portrayal in the media has changed discernibly.
“I think they sort of went from folks in tinfoil hats to folks who have some influence over electoral politics in the United States,”he says. “And because they were influencing things towards conservative and Republican candidates, they went from [being thought of as] perhaps a whacky, zany army of politicos to a dangerous political force.
“I think that shift probably started with Virginia and New Jersey, and really hit its peak with the special election that was in Massachusetts.”
Incumbents Beware
Will the tea parties prove to be change agents for the elections coming up in 2010 and 2012?
That may hinge on whether the movement’s snowball effect continues. In March, Rasmussen asked voters whether they considered themselves a part of the tea party movement, and 16 percent said yes. By April, that number jumped to 24 percent — enough to make even deniers sit up and take notice.
The tea party’s rise corresponds with plummeting confidence in government. A recent Pew study showed that nearly 8 in 10 Americans no longer trust the federal government. Brewing tea party rancor together with disgust over Washington is not a mix incumbents look forward to in November.
Sal Russo, chief strategist of the Tea Party Express, tells Newsmax that the tea parties took off when average Americans realized they still could make a difference and be heard. Ramming unpopular legislation through Congress, he says, awakened a sleeping giant.
“People were sitting at home throwing their slippers at the TV set, angry, and they were saying, ‘Honey, we’re so out of the loop here. Everybody seems to like this guy [President Obama], and it’s like he seems to be abandoning the Constitution, and what’s going on?’”Russo says.
He adds, “They didn’t know what to do. And so we realized that people had to see that millions of Americans are sharing their views. And that if they got off of the couch and engaged in concerted action, they could actually change America and get it back.”
Concerned perhaps that the tea party movement is capable of wielding an increasing amount of clout, Team Obama appears to be looking for a way to make nice with grass-roots conservatives.
In April, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said tea party activists could prove helpful in forcing politicians to deal with the deficit. Geithner’s comments suggested that the administration had decided to be more circumspect in challenging the tea party juggernaut.
Democrats hope to use political jujitsu in the midterms by turning the tea party’s energy against the Republicans. Strong third-party candidates, they say, will siphon off GOP votes and push Republicans too far to the right, thereby alienating swing voters.
One flaw in this reasoning: Polls suggest that the tea parties are closer to independents’ views than the president on a wide range of issues: taxes, healthcare reform, deficits.
“You look at the bailouts, you look at the trillion-dollar deficits, and the tea party has very legitimate concerns about the direction of the country and growth of government,”FreedomWorks economist Wayne Brough tells Newsmax.
Powerful Force
Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., predicts the tea party legions will have a massive impact in November.
“The people who are still paying taxes are saying, ‘You know what? We’re not chumps,”she says, adding, “I am really proud of the reinvigorated American spirit . . . The tea party movement is just a reinvigoration of the American spirit . . . we are free men, and we intend to live that way.”
“They know how much territory they have lost in liberty and freedom,”says Tom Borelli, a fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research. “They know it is going to be a long battle, but they are prepared. The tea party leaders I’ve met . . . are very, very committed and energetic.”
Today, those energies are being directed at restoring the limited-government principles of a Constitution that many believe both political parties have trampled on.
Now that the tea parties have thrived despite unfounded accusations of ignorance, racism, and violence, a new tack is emerging against them: Some pundits say they’ve peaked and are declining. Crowds since the big 9-12 rallies have diminished, according to those pundits, who predict the movement will lose steam as the employment rate rises.
Tea party leaders respond to such talk with quiet confidence. In many ways, they say, the movement has entered a stealth phase, in which it’s gradually building strength in towns and neighborhoods across the nation.
Leaders such as Armey, Russo, Leahy, and Kibbe say the off-year election battles in New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts provided some valuable lessons. Tea party activists learned about the importance of having a very strong “ground game,”the get-out-the-vote activities that are so important to changing actual political outcomes.
Plenty of high-profile events remain on the tea party calendar, including rallies on July 4 and Sept. 12. But the movement’s stealth strategy focuses on more prosaic work: developing organizations at the state, precinct, and even neighborhood levels.
University of Virginia political science expert Larry Sabato tells Newsmax that activist tea parties in local precincts will prove to be a powerful, albeit unpredictable, political force.
“The tea party, being localized and grass roots, will have different effects in different places,”he says. “In some states and districts, the tea party will bring energy and enthusiasm to the GOP ticket, since the group is overwhelmingly Republican and conservative in orientation. In other places, tea party candidates, especially independents on the November ballot, could split the GOP vote and help Democrats. It’s too early to know how many cases of each there will be.”
When asked about reports that the tea parties are off the front burner and simmering down, Russo smiles and says, “Well, as Ronald Reagan used to always say, ‘Let’s be happy they are underestimating us, because that means we are going to win.’”
Grass-roots conservatives will experience “a tremendous victory”in November, Russo predicts.
If so, the tea party’s triumph will recall a fateful February morning in Chicago when Rick Santelli bared his soul to a restless nation.
That already seems like a long time ago. But Santelli remembers it every time strangers approach to tell him how his words restored their faith that a citizen’s lone voice in the wilderness still matters.
“A lot of people say the same thing when they recognize me,”Santelli says. “They always start out saying, ‘Thank you.’ And they say: ‘We were thinking this, many people were thinking it, these were the kinds of conversations we were having around the table. But you made us feel more emboldened to actually go forth and feel brave enough to start challenging the things we think we disagree with, or the things we want to change with regard to our government, our leaders, or the programs they put forth.’” In other words, they thank Santelli for showing them how to rant.
As originally published in Newsmax magazine.
*****
Kevin Dayhoff Soundtrack: http://kevindayhoff.blogspot.com/ = http://www.kevindayhoff.net/ Kevin Dayhoff Art: http://kevindayhoffart.blogspot.com/ or http://kevindayhoffart.com/ = http://www.kevindayhoff.com/ Kevin Dayhoff Westminster: http://kevindayhoffwestgov-net.blogspot.com/ or http://www.westgov.net/ = www.kevindayhoff.org Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevindayhoff Twitpic: http://twitpic.com/photos/kevindayhoff Kevin Dayhoff's The New Bedford Herald: http://kbetrue.livejournal.com/ = www.newbedfordherald.net Explore Carroll: www.explorecarroll.com The Tentacle: www.thetentacle.com
