Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell will venture into the Tea Party movement at the inaugural Virginia Tea Party Patriots Convention in Richmond next month — one of his first forays into the renegade conservative movement that has shaken up the national political landscape this year.
The governor is scheduled to participate with Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling on a panel about state government efficiency — an issue that McDonnell has made a central tenet of his first year in office. Last month, he traveled throughout the state trying to garner support for his most high-profile proposal to reform government: a plan to privatize Virginia’s state-run liquor stores.
Other confirmed attendees include former CNN host Lou Dobbs, U.S. Reps. Steve King and Ron Paul, former U.S. Sen. and Gov. George Allen, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
The group, which also invited former Virginia Democratic Gov. Doug Wilder, said it felt a need to focus on what’s going on in the state, said Jamie Radtke, president of the Richmond Tea Party and chairman of the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation.
“We saw what can be done” in the state after the General Assembly last session passed health care legislation supported by the organization, Radtke said.
For someone like McDonnell — who is faced with term limits and will be looking for another job in a few years — the move makes sense, said Stephen Farnsworth, a professor of communication at George Mason University whose expertise includes presidential elections and Virginia politics.
“For the last six months, we have seen [in] one Republican nominating primary after another that the Tea Party is a force to be reckoned with at the nomination stage,” Farnsworth said. “It’s absolutely smart politics for the governor to talk to the Tea Party. … The Republican Party needs to find a way to co-opt the Tea Party to its own purposes.”
The announcement Monday of McDonnell’s role at the convention came soon after the governor spoke favorably about the movement, describing it in a recent appearance on Fox News as “a natural outcropping of this unbelievable lurch to the left we’ve seen in the U.S. Congress with this administration.”
“At the end of the day, the candidate that wins in a Republican primary is [going to] have broad support from Republicans, from Tea Party activists, and frankly from mainstream independent candidates that are tired of this big government approach, so no, I’m not worried about it,” he said on “Your World with Neil Cavuto.” “I think it’s a healthy debate within the Republican Party and will return us to these fiscally conservative roots.”
The governor is a vocal advocate for fiscal responsibility and restraint, spokesman Tucker Martin wrote in an e-mail.
“You can expect him to continue to talk about these important issues in any number of settings between now and Election Day,” he wrote.
