Especially after this.
Posted on 02/27/2010 8:38:14 PM PST by neverdem
After months of struggling to harness the energy of newly engaged tea party activists, the conservative establishment — with critical midterm congressional elections on the horizon — is taking aim for the first time at the movement’s extremist elements.
The move has been cast by some conservatives as a modern version of the marginalization of the far-right, anti-communist John Birch Society during the reorganization of the conservative movement spearheaded by William F. Buckley Jr. in the 1960s and 1970s.
“A similar effort will be required today of conservative political and intellectual leaders,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson wrote in his column in The Washington Post. “It will not be easy. Sometimes it takes courage to stand before a large crowd and proclaim that two plus two equals four.”
But for Gerson and other conservatives, this is not just an intellectual exercise. They have a very specific political goal: to deprive Democrats and their allies of a potentially potent weapon to use against the GOP in November.
“I don’t believe we should be giving [extremists] a platform or empowering them to do anything based off their conspiracy theories,” said Ned Ryun, president of American Majority, “because they give the left ammunition to try to define the tea party movement as crazy and fringy.”
The attempt “to clean up our own house,” as Erick Erickson, founder of the influential conservative blog RedState, puts it, is necessary “because traditional press outlets have decided to spotlight these fringe elements that get attracted to the movement, and focus on them as if they’re a large part of this tea party movement. And I don’t think they are.”
Until recently, organizers and activists mostly seemed content to ignore, or in some cases tolerate, extremists in their ranks, confident they’d be drowned out by the hundreds of thousands of activists who took to congressional town halls and marches around the country to protest big-spending initiatives pushed by President Barack Obama and the Democratic Congress.
But inflammatory rhetoric such as former congressman Tom Tancredo’s racially tinged speech at this month’s tea party convention, reports of the involvement of right-wing militia groups and the continued propagation of conspiracy theories about Obama have sometimes cast the movement in an unfavorable light.
Erickson has advised new tea party organizers on how to avoid affiliations with extremists and this month banned birthers — conservatives who believe that Obama was not born in the United States and is, therefore, ineligible to be president — from his blog. (He has long blacklisted truthers, those who believe that the U.S. government was complicit in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — a conspiracy theory with devotees across the political spectrum.)
“At some point, you have to use the word ‘crazy,’” said Erickson.
Ryun’s American Majority, a group that trains tea party activists and others around the country, has done much the same thing. Its website has moved to close its sessions to activists who identify themselves with the birther, truther or militia movements or the John Birch Society.
Ryun conceded that extremists are involved in the tea party movement. But he said, “It’s just such a small percentage, and it should not be portrayed as representative of the broader movement.”
The fringe fighters’ methods range from censuring signs at rallies or banishing unruly participants completely to challenging the media’s focus on the fringe and highlighting the movement’s diversity and tolerance.
They have gone out of their way, for example, to promote activists and movement-backed candidates of color, including tea party stars Marco Rubio and Allen West, running for U.S. Senate and House, respectively, in Florida, and Texas Senate candidate Michael Williams — all Republicans.
Ryan has another strategy. He has commissioned a poll that he thinks will show that tea partiers share with independent voters a commitment to reducing taxation and government spending and prove that the tea party movement is “very much mainstream.”
But the tea party movement’s decentralized structure, vaguely defined goals and anti-establishment tone make it an attractive place to channel angry feelings. Mainstream media organizations such as The New York Times, which recently ran a 4,500 word story on the infiltration of the movement by a militia-linked group called Oath Keepers, have recently focused on these aspects of the movement.
Independent of their actual numbers, it’s in both political parties’ interests to inflate the influence of the other side’s fringe, said Tom De Luca, a Fordham University political science professor who studies political movements and wrote the 2005 book “Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers! Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics.”
“That creates this dynamic that seems to exaggerate the influence of the extremes,” De Luca said.
Much as conservatives have sought to link Democrats to environmental extremism or socialism, he said, it’s an obvious countermove for the left to try to link Republicans with the more extreme elements that have gained traction around — and sometimes within — the tea partiers.
So it was that liberals have demanded to know where Republicans stood on Obama’s citizenship, or that last week found left and right debating which side had more in common with Andrew Joseph Stack III, the software developer who crashed his plane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas.
The left seized on a comment by hard-line conservative Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), reportedly expressing his empathy for the pilot’s anti-tax views. Rush Limbaugh retorted that Stack “sounds like he's blaming Bush and Reagan," asserting that he sounded “almost word for word [like] Nancy Pelosi. Almost word for word [like] Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama.”
De Luca predicted that another “Bill Buckley moment” will occur only when the political damage done by extremists outweighs the boost the tea party movement has provided to conservatives generally and the Republican Party specifically.
“My guess is their basic stance will be to try to juggle as long as they can,” he said.
That approach — and its drawbacks — were on display at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering of Washington’s conservative establishment. It featured the John Birch Society as a co-sponsor. And while conference organizers nixed a panel on Obama’s citizenship, a birther contingent still made its presence felt, as did the Oath Keepers, who co-sponsored the conference.
After filming a brief segment at the conference, liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, a leading tea party antagonist, concluded on her show that “the conservative movement right now is really not afraid to let its freak flag fly. … They‘re happy to show off the ‘we want another revolutionary war,’ ‘we think the black president is arrogant,’ ‘we think the apocalypse is nice’ side of themselves.”
Liberal commentators similarly highlighted the extremism on display at this month’s National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, Tenn., which included a speech by WorldNetDaily Editor Joseph Farah questioning Obama’s citizenship and one by Tancredo asserting Obama was elected because "we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country."
A blogger on the liberal site Daily Kos asserted Tancredo’s speech revealed the “REAL reason” tea partiers are upset: “A black man is President and their White Privelege [sic] is fading.”
Tancredo’s speech was not widely condemned by conservative intellectuals or media, but immediately after Farah delivered his, he was confronted in a hallway outside the convention hall by conservative media entrepreneur and fellow convention speaker Andrew Breitbart, who said it was a disservice to the tea party movement to infer its activists are “all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue.”
Others cited the jeering of an anti-gay activist at CPAC who condemned organizers for inviting gay Republican group GOProud to participate. Conservative author and TownHall columnist Ashley Herzog said it was proof that “CPAC, and the conservative movement in general, isn’t a haven for haters after all,” and urged the left to view a video of the incident, which she said is evidence of “a lack of bigotry [that] must be painfully puzzling to liberals.”
Conservatives similarly pushed back against a New York Times blog post that accused a CPAC speaker of ripping Obama “in racial tones," partly by affecting a "Chris Rock voice" to mock the president.
They noted that the speaker — like comedian Rock — is from Brooklyn and speaks with a regional accent, and demanded an apology.
And in a clever Web video that went viral this week, the Dallas Tea Party called out MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, who had mocked the mostly white makeup of the Nashville convention of what he called the "Tea Klux Klan," comparing its racially diverse leadership to MSNBC’s mostly white host lineup.
Judson Phillips, the Nashville tea party activist who organized this month’s convention, said it’s incumbent on local tea party leaders across the country “to control the message and to prevent the tea party movement from being hijacked.”
In the run-up to a July tea party convention he’s planning in Las Vegas, Phillips said, he’s planning to ask speakers “to stick to our message, which is unity headed into the fall.”
This is crap. Who is this guy?
Tea Party needs to flank the Republicans to the far right. This positions Republicans in the center of American politics and Dems to the far left.
I say SCREW YOU to those who want to “marginalize the “far-right”” in media terms that is anyone who holds to a constitutional view, and Christian beliefs of morality.
That’s including these fake conservative (establishment) ‘leaders’ quoted in this article. You will never purge the TRUTH (those who hold a constitutional view of govt. even on Obc, and the proper role of arms)..
yeah but we can’t have the kooks. We already have the Stupid Party. We don’t need 2.
The extremists nowadays are all stationed in the White House anyways.
The Tea Party remained it's most influential when they did not have folks stepping out as "leaders" to speak on it's behalf. As long as it remained an undefined, agitated, incalculable group of citizens capable of huge, unexpected groundswells, it kept both sides of the aisle on their toes.
Get organized, get defined, get marginalized, get ignored.
Tea Partiers don't need anyone to speak for them. We've had enough of that crap from Washington. We can speak for OURSELVES.
No, the crowd didn't "boo" the speaker after he spoke, but BEFORE.
It was something typical of the homosexual fascist movement that seeks to shout down anyone who might conceivably criticize their lifestyle choices.
Seems to me any writer who purports to be Conservative, or who claims to be able to divine Conservative intent, might want to keep his pro-homosexual proclivities out of his piece if he wants to be listened to.
Oh, I get it. The RINOs are defining fringe as anyone who has a problem with illegal aliens, the border, thinks there is a right to keep and bear arms, is Pro-Life, doesn't believe in Glowbull Warming blah blah blah. Bring it!
But never anything about NAACP, ACLU, CAIR, LULAC, The Race . . . leftist profs hiding behind tenure.
Run "moderates" again. It still won't work.
So let me get this straight... The people from various backgrounds rally in the absence of any direction or impetus from the “conservatives” in the republican party, and now the mainstream “conservative republicans (if there is such a thing)” are going to now set the rules for the tea party?
I think not... Sure there are crazies in the tea party movement. I say so what! Look at the crazy (McCrazy) republican the RNC gave us in 2008 to vote for. I haven’t seen anyone in the tea party who can match that.
The tea party will be just fine unless they are co-opted by the republican or democrat party.
Uh, I don't know you, Mike, but you sound like a liberal. Just what do you think telling us that “two plus two equals four” is going to accomplish, you idiot?
It’s spin doctoring...oath keepers isnt a militia gruop at all....it’s a group who has declared they will ignore unconstitutional orders to disarm the populus should such an order be given...
Ofcorse this is viewed as a threat by those who would gladly issue such orders....
No moderates! And moderate Perot was also a kooky nut.
Agreed.
Politico diversionary propaganda.
As we speak, democrat party operatives are trying to set up fake 3rd parties to steal the 2010 elections.
There is a fake Tea Party Senate Candidate in Nevada, set up to help Harry Reid get re-elected.
Running RNIO's will get the GOP slaughtered at the polls. We need opposition in ideology, not just meaningless sloganeering.
Just the country clubbers at it again.If we follow the constitution we are called extreme by the elite of both sides.Screw them all.
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