I just discovered that a reporter from the Dallas Morning News, with whom I had an phone interview last week, actually used a quote from me in his piece “Front-runner Romney hardly a tea party favorite“:
“Was the tea party movement, if we don’t nominate a conservative tea party candidate, much of a success?” said Skip Murphy, a tea party activist in New Hampshire. “My main goal is to beat Obama. If we stop the progressive administration and start to move toward more conservative values in this government, that’s something. It’s taken years to get where we are, and it’s going to take years to turn this around.”
And he also quoted fellow TEA Party activists Jerry DeLemus, Jane Aitken, Ken Eyring, and Brad Winslow. In fact, the quote from Brad reinforced what I had been trying to emphasize with the reporter, Wayne Slater :
Brad Winslow, a software designer from Salem, agreed that while the tea party might fall short in putting a staunchly conservative budget hawk in the White House, its impact would be felt in local and state politics.
“We’re changing school boards and we’re getting local officials elected. Certainly at the state level of New Hampshire, we’ve made gains,” he said. “Have we solved our problems with RINOs [Republicans in name only]? … It’s going to take a while to weed that out.”
Get that last part? About “We’re changing school boards and we’re getting local officials elected. So true.
The knock on the Presidential Primary campaign is “oh, the TEA Party is broken and old news” because there is no clearly identifiable TEA Party candidate in the running (a la Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL). The Republican Establishment is happy, the Left is saying ‘whew!” and the media is supporting both. Yet, all three are missing the point of what the TEA Party is and what it is all about.
For instance: I’m an elected Budget Committee member in my SB2 town here in NH (er, that “is” could be “was”; we just finished working on the last of the Public Hearings on the town and school board budgets and will be voted upon by the townfolk – if no changes are made at the Deliberative Sessions, Thursday nite was my last). Then it is either on to Operation Payback / the School Board race, or whether or not the non-apology apology by Town Administrator Scott Dunn is insufficient and another run for the BudComm is in the offing….but I digress). And I am not the only one.
This past year and all over this country, newly activated folks gathered together first to attend events which then morphed into protests of Progressive candidates (of both Parties) that were spending us into oblivion. And when it became obvious that public opinion was insufficient to change their ways, TEA Partiers decided to change the politicians. This was a complete repudiation of the movement’s starting premise: politicians were anathema. But, it was a necessary change. People ran for office, and if that was not their cup of TEA, they helped others to run in one way or another. I noted the TEA Party’s result on Nov 3, 2011. But the better result was shown by this.
Change can start at the top but is more lasting when it happens from the bottom. That last link – look at that map again. Blue to Red – the work of the TEA Party. Sure, getting a TEA Party President would be the cherry on the top of the sundae. But it has taken decades to get to the point where our government barely even gives the Constitution lip service – it will take years and years of constant effort (and big clubs) to get to the point where the first thought in the minds of politicians when about to do something or craft legislation is “how does this really fit into the philosophy of the Constitution”. Not just the words, not just looking for a dodge, but a time when politicians truly are imbued with its spirit.
Yeah, we still have a lot of work in front of us. But no, success is not measure merely by having a TEA Party President.
Get to work, y’all!
