America’s Tea Party movement — the populist conservative cause that has risen up in response to the big-government policies of Barack Obama — has seized the spotlight. Its first national conference, held over the weekend in Nashville, featured a number of prominent speakers and was capped by a nationally televised speech by Sarah Palin.
But the Tea Partiers face the same challenge faced by all populist protest movements: Crafting policies is far harder than simply venting against the status quo. Once they have driven the subject of their discontent from office, or forced him to retreat (say, from health-care reform), they typically descend into petty in-fighting or are co-opted by an established political party.
As their Tennessee convention showed, once one gets passed the Tea Partiers’ common interest in spoiling “Obamacare” and stopping the expansion of the U.S. federal government, the movement is not exactly brimming with sophisticated policy ideas. Its rank-and-file is a colourful but quarrelsome hodgepodge of fundamentalist Christians, antitax activists, anti-immigration cranks, protectionists, mixed in with more mainstream conservative Republicans.
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Don’t let ward read this
But of course the premise of the article is wrong.
As I understand it, the thrust right now is in the primaries. Once a candidate is selected, i think you will see the tea partiers get behind that candidate whether or not it was their preferred person.
In fact Palin emphasized this in her speech. She made several comments about the focus on the primaries. She also firmly rejected the thought of a third party, as did many in attendance.
The problem that arose in NY-23 was that they had no primary election.
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