I know what the TEA Party is...and I know what it is not.
They are proposing to be a coalition of local TEA Parties...not a party or a national organization. Do you resent donations to the NRA or the former Christian Coalition? They use purity of their interests as their barometer to make their donations...no matter the party.
Frankly, I’m glad the RNC is having difficulty with them...and they are having huge difficulties. The RNC isn’t getting the donations that they are used to getting. Something needs to shake them up, and bring them back on the Reagan path.
The only fiction I’ve seen the press report is that the TEA Party members are all racist redneck Nazis.
When fundamental changes in our government come (back to a Republic) they will come because we will have candidates for National office who have been tempered in the forges of local politics, state office, and who have proven not only their worth as statesmen but their steadfast nature as followers of the Constitution.
Real change will not come from the top down, only remedies for the current sickness which has invaded the Republic at virtually all levels.
While it is important to have large organizations, the heavy lifting will be done at the local and state level.
It isn't the Christian Coalition who feeds the hungry in my community, it is the local churches. Yet both Organizations have their place.
I am a member of the NRA, have been for decades. That does not mean I abandon the local and State issues to the NRA: if so, darned few would get any attention. While the NRA acts as a fire brigade to help with a few nationally important local fights, they generally have not been there to fight those fights as local and state gunowners' organizations have been, and at the core of any effort are the energized individuals who donate freely of their time, money, and talent to get the job done.
The TEA party movement is an assemblage of the latter who have organized for the purpose of fighting at the local, state, ad national level, but we have organized from the bottom up. The NRA is a top-down organization. The GOP is a top-down organization. Each has their place, but I would not give up the involvement and shadetree activism of the TEA party movement for an easily villified or co-opted National Tea Party (as in political party) any more than I would give up my local gun club.
I especially do not like the relative vulnerability of a national organization, particularly when the press seek to villify a movement millions strong on the basis of a non-event (someone allegedly spitting and calling someone names--even though there is no evidence of that), because it will only take one 'poster child', possibly even a plant, to engage in acts so wretched that the whole movement could be shut down by force and/or 'popular' opinion.
That has been the angle of the whole racist/redneck/neonazi/domestic terrorist canard in the MSM, to try to get one villified if nameless person to represent the whole movement to shut it down. It is the lack of structure which has made that impossible.
Solidify the structure, and there is something to strike, whereas local organizations are like smoke--there, visible, but not solid enough to hit, no matter how many are present.
Local organizations have done quite well at coordinating and cooperating, even to the national level.
On the other hand, there is a national organization, ready to go with a few personnel changes, which has ballot recognition and a cadre who will likely follow it regardless, and who will siphon off a large part of the vote, regardless of who they prop up as a candidate. I would just as soon see our efforts go to siezing significant control of that vehicle rather than reinventing the wheel, and that will be done where the rubber meets the road.