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.





