Posted on 01/07/2012 10:12:20 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
I don't know what happened between November of 2010 and January of 2012, but from the looks of things the Tea Party died.
How else do you explain it?
Rewind to November of 2010, race after race, congressional seat after congressional seat, Governorship after Governorship. Only a little more than eighteen months after President Obama had packed the mall in Washington for his historic inaugural, the Tea Party held it's historic event in which nearly the same size audience had attended--according to maps supplied by the USA Today. That event catapulted a state by state tsunami-like momentum where grassroots, low tax, small government, pro-founding principles, pro-life, pro-national security, and pro-God forces aligned and an election victory of historic equivalence shook America in 2010.
The driving force of that agitation then as it is still today was the effect of a poor economy, government intervention, federal overreach, bureaucratic mandates, and punitive taxes on the nation's beleaguered small business community. Entitlements, bail-outs, and criminally reckless spending ensued.
The Tea Party believed that the buffoons authoring the mess should be dealt a blow. And in 2010 they leveled power in the Congress.
The single biggest example of this overreach was for Washington politicians, behind closed doors, with no transparency, to take a health care reform law--deem it as passed--and force upon the American people the worst piece of legislation to be passed since World War II. Little wonder that even the worst Vice President in our history, Joe Biden, used an expletive to describe it.
"Obamacare" as it would soon become monikered was and is at this very moment--in this election cycle--the singular most visible sign that this nation must take a different course.
Some very good people got elected in 2010 to attempt to help lay the groundwork for the complete repeal of Obamacare. Star-On-The-Rise Governor Nikki Haley in South Carolina, and Senator-soon-to-be-the-next-Vice-President Marco Rubio rode the shoulders of these Tea Party votes, and pledged with their victories to return power to the voice of "We The People." The failed candidacies of Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell were also propped up almost entirely by the support of these first amendment patriots who simply wished to keep government in check.
Former Governor Sarah Palin rallied these troops, showed up and helped them raise cash, enthusiasm, and enlistments. The numbers of the Tea Party were tens of thousands of times bigger than the largest Occupy Wall Street gatherings--combined!
Yet only a little over a year later and the goal of the Tea Party to complete it's work and overturn Obamacare is all but dead.
In 2010 even Ann Coulter was making speeches at CPAC warning that if we chose the candidate who had authored Obamacare to become the nominee, then President Obama would be easily re-elected. She was right of course.
But somewhere along the line instead of being bold, defiant, grassroots, and in control, someone started feeding voters the meme that the man who saw to it that $50 state-subsidized abortions were included in his vision of mandated government health care, was the best of poor choices.
Even Ann Coulter 2.0 drank the kool-aid.
Worse yet the choices that are left in the race are establishment folks who ate earmarks for a living in Pennsylvania, embraced government involvement in the biggest hoax of our time--man made Global Warming, and who could forget the man that as Governor of Massachusetts raised taxes on everything from gasoline to "certificates of blindness." (No it's real... Look it up.)
Your humble correspondant has detailed the easy path that Obama's forces will take to not merely defeat a Romney GOP candidacy, but to pummel him into tapioca.
And according to my sources, campaign strategists who consult for the Obama team confirmed, they are getting the GOP candidate they most want.
I need to remind you that the win in Iowa meant strategically nothing. Those delegates will go to whoever the likely nominee is, and won't even be assigned until the convention. New Hampshire has a puny amount of delegate votes--but at least they will be genuine delegates. This year South Carolina is where the battle truly begins. South Carolina has more delegates than Iowa and New Hampshire combined and Tea Party strongholds from Virginia all the way around the coast to Texas are delegate rich battlegrounds.
The two biggest priorities for primary voters are to decide which candidate can make Washington DC as inconsequential to the life of the average American as possible, and who can challenge President Obama directly on the worst legislation of our time--Obamacare.
Mitt Romney has no track record that would point to being able to accomplish either of these. Even a small whiff of a challenge on Obamacare by Romney will be followed up with an Obama "thank you" note for writing it for him.
It is almost impossible to believe and violently sickening to accept that in light of the clear mandate of the Tea Party that the GOP stands on the cusp of returning to "establishmentism." (Imaginary word mine.) But it appears that for all the big talk, tens of thousands of local rallies, and the single largest non-inaugural event to ever occur on our nation's mall, the Tea Party has died.
Which is sad, for me personally, because I addressed those patriots, on that mall, that cloudy Washington DC day.
That first tea party in DC took place exactly three days after President Obama's joint session, where he had instructed his supporters on Obamacare to go "get in people's faces" if they disagreed with the policy. He told his critics that he was calling them out.
I remember bringing that little point to the attention of the close to 1.2 million gathered on the mall that afternoon. The chants of "Here we are, Here we are, Here we are" rang in my ears for days.
Sadly now I wonder, "Where'd we go?"
It died on October 5 2010
With 14 debates behind us, no candidate seems to want to really punch Romney. It’s beginning to look more like scripted productions, than debates. Pillow fights instead of real punches.
Infiltration in the ranks and muddled thinking caused the splintering. Including-—the author’s. His article is mainly on the mark, but as one senator among 100, you have to work with reality as it is. SANTORUM’s constituents were being taxed, so he had to make the best of the situation. It is up to individual senators to make sure that THEIR state doesn’t get steamrolled, and it IS his JOB to decide how money is spent. NOT unelected bureaucrats.
Attitudes like the author’s come from the Neverland, and to some extent, it reflects Utopian thinking to believe that a congressman can be effective if he holds himself above the fray. Bob
Not dead, hibernating.
“The Tea Party is not dead by a long shot”
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I consider myself to be a tea party type conservative.
If I were still living in the US, I would have been right in the thick of Tea Party activities.
I am now, however far away and thanking God every day that
I am not back there.
The Tea Party represents the last vestige of true American values and heritage.
If they are gone, America is gone.
I truly believe that it will take an act of God to save the country.
A lot of dumb stuff went on in the debate/love fest. And the thought of borrowing another trillion from China to go back into Iraq was one of the dumbest. A few drones and a few hundred well placed hell fires would fix the mookie problem.
Give it a reason to come back and it will. Bigger than before.
It died because the people we worked so hard to elect, turned on us so fast that we said why bother.
Yeah, Alan West, Pat Toomey, Charlie Bass and the rest of you that compromised (i.e., sold out) your principles, I’m calling you out. Normally, I’d say “We put you in, we’ll take you out”; but why bother, the next person will be just as bad.
Time to realize that government isn’t going to change, no matter who is elected. The regime won’t go away, until and unless, we the people take it upon ourselves.
...”The Tea Party is alive and well. Even if there is never another big gathering, the ideas and ideals of traditional American values, Freedom and limited government by the people will live on”...
YES! Because freedom is an instinctual longing in every human being..Am I wrong in my impression that the Tea Party was never really an organization?..My opinion is that many people are laying low to see whether the nation is going to survive..These same people will fight for freedom when and if the time comes.
The Tea Party is only as dead as it wishes to be. And judging by the energy at the meetings I attend here in VA, there`s plenty life left at the grassroots level. However, the movement doesn`t represent the majority of America. Sadly, that majority is comprised of a wide range of attitudes ranging from apathetic to perpetually dependent to strident leftist.
No, he is not right.
The TEA party is a voting block. We voted in the mid-term elections and sent the elected officials to do what they could.
We don’t need endless rally after rally to “express” ourselves.
The sentiments of the TEA party don’t disappear
T-Party has made the determination that both crappy parties need to die, along with the majority of the bureaucracies.
As a born Tennessean I find this saddening.
Tennessee has always been a great conservative state, at least the eastern two thirds. I think we all know the problem with west Tennessee.
Keep in mind that stupid Gore did not carry Tennessee when he ran for POTUS.
We always knew him and his family to be frauds and crooks.
Absolutely not.
What is the tea party supposed to do when there are no elections, like in 2011?
Don’t worry. We are there.
It happens every four years. The Conservative candidates split the Conservative vote and the Moderate (John McCain, Mitt Romney....) wins by a plurality in the early states and that momentum carries them to the nomination. Perry should have gotten his ass out, but he’s too dumb to know that.
Even Ann Coulter 2.0 drank the kool-aid.
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Yeah, promoted Christ Christie first and now endorses Romney and disses the Conservative candidates every chance she gets. The biggest surprise of 2011 for me; how she became such a political whore so quickly; almost overnight. NOTE: I said “political” whore.
Even Ann Coulter 2.0 drank the kool-aid.
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Yeah, promoted Christ Christie first and now endorses Romney and disses the Conservative candidates every chance she gets. The biggest surprise of 2011 for me; how she became such a political whore so quickly; almost overnight. NOTE: I said “political” whore.
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