Organizers of the conservative tea party movement are forging plans to translate the anger that fueled nationwide anti-tax rallies and town hall protests into an electoral force that can boot incumbents in next year’s midterm elections.
Their targets range from big names like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., to county assessors.
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Those sympathetic to the tea party and the 9/12 Project — nine principles and 12 values including God, marriage, freedom, honesty and thrift trumpeted by Fox News commentator Glenn Beck — are forming political action committees and rallying around screenings of the newly released “Tea Party: The Documentary Film.”
But the biggest challenge facing the movement is how to organize hundreds of local groups and dozens of tea party leaders nationwide with divergent interests into a force that can influence elections — and how to fund that effort.
“It’s a hard question to answer,” said Mark Meckler, a Nevada County, Calif., attorney who is a national coordinator for Tea Party Patriots, which claims to reach 15 million people nationwide. “We are a leaderless movement, and that’s a good thing. I don’t think you’re going to see a unified movement yet.”
There is a growing impatience brewing nationally. More people (23 percent) supported a generic Tea Party candidate than a Republican (18 percent) in a Rasmussen Poll released last week, while 36 percent of those surveyed supported a Democrat. The rest were undecided.
But there is “zero excitement” for any of the three Republican candidates for California governor, said Joe Wierzbicki, the Sacramento-based national coordinator for the Tea Party Express, a bus tour that held 90 rallies nationwide.
Next year, the group hopes to raise at least $5 million to focus on 15 to 20 congressional races, particularly Reid’s, Wierzbicki said.
“There are two battles that are going to happen for the tea party, and one is over the Republican Party,” he added.
Though some tea party supporters disparage President Obama as a “socialist,” and compare him to Adolf Hitler, behind-the-scenes organizers are studying the grassroots training methods of the late Saul Alinsky, the community organizer known for campus protests in the 1960s, and who inspired the structure of Obama’s presidential campaign.
