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kristinn, I respectfully disagree. Legitimacy would come from the millions of people, not from the organizations those individuals lead.

From almost everything I’ve heard, the Tea Parties do not put themselves under the leadership of any national organization. I know I don’t, and the folks I TP’ed with on April 15 didn’t either.

These ‘national leaders’ are presumptive and if they do go for a meeting with Obama, what the heck will they be doing, negotiating? Ha, that’s like grabbing a greased pig.

Read down the comments, Michael Patrick Leahy has been removed from the Tea Party group due to trying to usurp the movement for his own gain.

Leahy was trying to attach his extra pet issues such as a bill for federalism and a new constitutional convention, which no one was onboard with. He was also piping down orders to various tea parties (us included) which only perturbed them, wasn`t doing his share of the organizational work, and was getting a reputation as a grandstander in the media. Some of the things he wanted us to do was get together a list of all the people that signed in at every tea party and make it national, which only he was wanting, and made that an order and everyone just ignored him, and wanted everyone to jump through some technology hoops to get all our media up on TCOT. The Monday before the 15th, many of us made time for the national conference call expecting it to be important, and surprise! It was during a broadcast of his PJTV show, where he was broadcasting himself speaking on an static filled echo loudly over the line and we all had to yell to hear each other, if at all, until he finally cut to us to put us on his show. We were pretty ticked at it losing valuable organizing time and wasting our time in general. He was growing very unpopular among almost all of the organizers and was finally shown the door. Everyone pretty much supported the decision when it was done a week ago. His group that he has isn`t very strong. some of the people listed were never consulted. He had Andrew Ian Dodge listed there, until Andrew complained loud enough to be removed. It was 850 to the supposed 25. Meanwhile, everyone else was going forward with tea party patriots, holding the normal national, state, and regional, conference calls and maintaining the mailing list. It wasn`t them that splintered off from Leahy, but Leahy who was pushed out due to all the complaints and he tried to take a few with him. The national mailing list has exploded against him pretty hard after his stunt with the "press conference" though, and had to finally take it public to disavow it. No one was consulted, and now he has everyone absolutely SEETHING at him. There were 2 ways the movement was going... Leahy seemed to want a top down thing with him at top. Everyone else wanted to just manage themselves and have a bottom up movement, which Tea Party Patriots is. We just really want an organization there to be able to connect with each other and represent us when someone is bothering us. They`ve done great work to get groups that were bothering us off our backs and were responsive when we had problems. I actually liked Leahy, but am just very disappointed in him... He just does not speak for us, and just worked to alienate himself from other organizers.