There is a lot of truth in your comment. The power of the Tea Party was not being aligned with any political party. The reasoning for that is you then have the power to make the politicians move your way because they can’t be certain they would get your votes unless they do. They would also be very worried the Tea Party might actually get out there and protest them if they slide left.
The worse thing to happen is that people in the GOP used the Tea Party mantle to get elected, and then went the opposite direction on too many issues.
When you get desperate and you try to pin “Tea Party” on people who have supported individual mandates, agree with global warming BS, declare the era of Reagan over, then go on to attack capitalism, you lose fellow supporters and steam.
Newt's not attacking capitalism, he's asking people to look at Romney's record and see if he's been honest and if he's presidential material or not. The video was posted above in this thread about how Newt never agreed with cap and trade. The mandate was used to stop Hilarycare and eventually to stop single-payer takeover Obamacare, which only a handful of Dems stopped from passing and replaced with the mandate, which no matter what you think of it, still beats single-payer. Newt doesn't support the mandate now.
Newt has been endorsed by Michael Reagan, Art Laffer and other Reaganites and calls himself a Reaganite. His quote below about the Reagan "era" was a benign remark about how the Reagan/Bush dynasty was over and a new candidate would redefine the party. It had nothing to do with changing conservative positions or policies. You, my friend, are a victim of Newt Derangement Syndrome where every little quote he's ever said is twisted into some freakish, nightmarish distortion to portray him as the opposite of what he really is.
GINGRICH: "I think the brokered convention would pick one of the people who had filed for president, but I think the process, after all, it was... You know, Abraham Lincoln was running third and won the convention. He didn't come in first on the first ballot, and so, I think there's nothing unhealthy about the Republican Party having a serious discussion. We are at the end of the George W. Bush era. We are at the end of the Reagan era. We're at a point in time when we're about to start redefining -- as a number of people started talking about, starting to redefine -- the nature of the Republican Party, in response to what the country needs."
And here is the whole transcript from the Newt interview where he is continually misquoted as supposedly saying the era of Reagan is over. He was pushing AN UNMISTAKABLY CONSERVATIVE AGENDA OF CHANGE, NEW IDEAS that were relevant to the nation’s current problems. Stop spreading the DemonRat/Romneybot lies. It is a psy-ops war of radical leftist propaganda that has been hard at work destroying the most consistently conservative candidate on our stage so that we can have an election of left vs. lefter.
http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/story?id=4128020&page=1#.Tw3KmoEeW9x
TRANSCRIPT Newt Gingrich Talks with George
January 13, 2008
Look, I think there are dramatic changes we need in this country.
We produced a platform of the American people at American Solutions. And it’s at the back of our book “Real Change.” It’s also at Americansolutions.com. Every single item on the list has a majority of Democrats, majority of Republicans, majority of independents favoring.
The easiest one is making English the official language of government.
Look, I think the first two things the president and the Congress can do on the economy is cut spending. If you’ll notice, you have a primary in Michigan, a state which artificially had a recession, because its government is so bad, its taxes are so high, its unionized work rules are so destructive, that Michigan was in a recession when the rest of the country was growing.
Part of — real change focuses — a long section on Detroit.
The truth is, large bureaucracies are destructive. High taxes are destructive. The system we’ve built discourages any business from opening up in Detroit. The schools don’t deliver. They do deliver paychecks. They do take care of the union. But they don’t deliver for the kids. And this is at a time when if you’re an African- American male and you drop out of high school, you have a 73 percent chance of being unemployed and a 60 percent chance of going to jail.
So I think we need dramatically deeper and more fundamental change.
So — but let’s take things the American people agree on. The American people agree you ought to make it easier to build oil refineries in the United States if you want to bring down the price of oil.
The American people agree that you ought to set up prizes for major breakthroughs. And that would be very different than the system we’ve used since World War II.
The American people, in fact, agree that we ought to have tax credits for people who are willing to go to greater conservation for their homes. I mean, far beyond just how do I subsidize your heating oil, how do I make it unnecessary for you to buy as much heating oil?
The Congress and the president do have an opportunity to listen to the American people, who are saying that real change does matter, and the real change is what they want.
The way the McCain/Feingold law currently discriminates against the middle class, is it sets up a system by which, you know, if you’re the mayor of New York and you’re Bloomberg and you’re worth $11 billion, you can contemplate buying the presidency and get away with it. If you are a self-, you know, a multi-millionaire governor and you want to, you can buy a nomination.
And so, I just think there’s nothing unhealthy about the Republican Party having a serious discussion. We are at the end of the George W. Bush era. We are at the end of the Reagan era.
We’re at a point in time where we’re about to start redefining — as a number of people have started talking about, we’re starting to redefine the nature of the Republican Party in response to what the country needs.