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Politics & The Nation
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The top national players in the tea party Americans for Prosperity
FreedomWorks
Spun off from Citizens for a Sound Economy in 2004 over ideological differences
Faces of the group
Tim Phillips President Phillips is a veteran political strategist who helped found Century Strategies, a national public affairs and political consulting firm.
Number of members
=10,000 1.5 million Local affiliates
Money spent
Who they are
500 1 million 500 $10 million $30 million Under $1 million
Largely funded by oil billionaire David Koch, Americans for Prosperity spends money on issue ads, phone banks and bus tours, and was instrumental in organizing protests at health-care town halls in summer 2009.
FreedomWorks is a Washington-based libertarian group focused on training volunteers to elect candidates who support limited government and free enterprise. Te group endorses candidates but does not buy TV ads, focusing instead on local get-out-the-vote efforts.
Te ouster of Utah Sen. Robert F. Bennett in May was the tea party’s first big win of the 2010 primary season. FreedomWorks was largely responsible for putting the resources on the ground that pushed Mike Lee to victory.
SOURCE: Staff reports ENDORSEMENTS
House Senate
With primary season over, FreedomWorks is expanding its list of approved candidates to include more establishment Republicans.
FreedomWorks endorsed Christine O’Donnell aſter she won the GOP nomination for the Senate seat formerly held by Vice President Biden.
In the waning weeks of the Alaska Senate Republican primary, Tea Party Express poured nearly $600,000 to support Joe Miller over Sen. Lisa Murkowski.
Tea Party Express spent nearly half a million dollars to help Sharron Angle win the GOP Senate nomination in Nevada, angering some tea party groups — including Tea Party Patriots — that felt as if Tea Party Express was seeming to speak for the movement.
Tea Party Nation’s claim to fame was a February 2010 convention featuring Sarah Palin as the keynote speaker. Te group came under fire for appearing to profit from the movement. Phillips twice canceled a second convention in Las Vegas for a lack of participation.
Kremer is the grass-roots face of Tea Party Express, but the PAC is run out of Russo’s firm, which benefits from some of TPE’s spending. Te group is best known for its bus tours and for plowing money into key Senate races across the country.
$4.2 million
$500,000 to date
Te Tea Party Patriots group is mostly a confederation of local organizations whose leadership is focused on being a connective tissue.
32,626 445 “Several hundred”
Founded in 1984 as Citizens for a Sound Economy; became FreedomWorks in 2005
Richard K. Armey Chairman A former Republican House majority leader, Armey joined a Washington lobbying firm aſter leaving Congress in 2003.
Fresh off big primary wins, national tea party groups are refocusing their energy on November. A guide to five groups that influence the movement: Tea Party Nation
Formed in April 2009 as a social networking site for conservatives
Judson Phillips Founder
A criminal defense lawyer, Phillips’s involvement in the tea party movement began in February 2009 with a rally he organized in downtown Nashville.
Tea Party Express
Formed in February 2009 as a project of the Our Country Deserves Better PAC
Sal Russo Chief strategist Russo is a longtime Republican operative who runs a political consulting firm in Sacramento.
Amy Kremer Chairman Kremer was a founding member of the Tea Party Patriots but was kicked out aſter a dispute and joined Tea Party Express.
406,000 Group would not divulge membership numbers 2,800 Tea Party Patriots
Formed in June 2009 by a group inspired by CNBC analyst Rick Santelli’s rant
Jenny Beth Martin Co-founder In April, Time magazine named Martin one of the 100 most
influential people, about a year aſter the Atlanta-based stay-at-home mom got involved in the movement.
Mark Meckler Co-founder
Meckler is a lawyer based in Sacramento.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 26, 2010
ENDORSEMENTS
House Senate
Christine O’Donnell’s long-shot bid to defeat nine-term Rep. Michael N. Castle was bolstered by a late infusion of $240,000 from Tea Party Express to run television and radio ads on her behalf.
BY AMY GARDNER, KAREN YOURISH AND LAURA STANTON/THE WASHINGTON POST
November elections will be a big test of tea party’s staying power tea party from A1
ment to one degree or another. Some tea party groups are defi- antly independent and take aim at Republicans as well as Demo- crats. Others seem more like off- shoots of the Republican Party. The movement’s competing mis- sions overlap and some of its leaders—such as there are any— clash and distrust one another. This tenuous assemblage of
similar yet competing interests is one of the tea party’s strengths. It has allowed the movement to rally millions of people by tap- ping into many strains of unhap- piness. Taken together, the many arms
of the tea party movement have, in an impressively short time, grown into a potent and disrup- tive political force. It proved, in a series of stunning victories in Republican primaries across the nation, that it can mobilize volun- teers, raise money (at least $60 million this year), end political careers and begin new ones. All without any formal structure or central leadership. Now, with the next test of a
general election approaching, the tea party has the nation’s atten- tion. The question is whether it is a momentary expression of dis- content in an angry election year or the chaotic first efforts of a durable political movement.
Started with a rant From its beginnings on the
afternoon of Feb. 19, 2009, the tea party has been difficult for many Americans to understand. That day, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli, standing on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Ex- change, unleashed a ferocious, hair-on-fire rant against Presi- dent Obama’s economic policies. He said he was going to hold a “Chicago Tea Party” to protest Obama’s efforts to rescue default- ing homeowners. As video of Santelli’s sermon
went viral on the Internet, Ameri- cans still in the thrall of the new administration dismissed him as an intolerant right-winger. But many others identified with his anger. They saw a government — and a president—who wanted to use their tax dollars to prop up the millionaire executives who sat atop bloated, badly run corpo- rations and corrupt banks, and to bail out irresponsible citizens who had bought houses they couldn’t afford. Connected via Twitter, Face-
book and plain-old e-mail, a vast network of conservative activists
CAROLYN KASTER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Jenny BethMartin, a founder of the Tea Party Patriots, announced Tuesday that her group had gotten an anonymous $1 million donation. “What we did was we nudged,
nationwide seized on the idea of a “tea party” and began planning them across the country. Anastasia Przybylski, 38, a
nurse and stay-at-home mother of three in Doylestown, Pa., was one of them. She had never been politically active in her life. On April 18 last year, Przybylski orga- nized a tea party at Washington Crossing, the famous spot in Bucks County where George Washington led the Continental Army across the Delaware River toward the Battle of Trenton in 1776. A local reporter dubbed her group the Kitchen Table Patriots. Przybylski still marvels that
her early effort drew hundreds of protesters. “It was pretty amaz- ing,” she recalled. “People just kept coming and coming and coming.” It did not take long for estab- lishment political groups to begin aligning themselves with this po-
tentially powerful new move- ment. One was FreedomWorks, an organization that is hardly grass roots. Headed by former representative Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.), who became a corporate lobbyistwhenhe left theHouse— and flush with millions of dollars from Republican donors — it works to elect libertarian-leaning Republican candidates. Its leaders quickly sawthat an
army of activists was awakening across the country — and that it had the resources toarmthemfor battle. With an e-mail list num- bering in the hundreds of thou- sands, FreedomWorks sent out instructions on forming a tea party. The group went to Sacra- mento and other cities to help local activists put on that first wave of events. They created a Google map to help protesters link up. It attracted 2 million views.
we shoved, we gave people direc- tion,” Brendan Steinhauser, a FreedomWorks organizer, re- called. “We said . . . ‘Here are the resources to do this,’ and we asked, ‘What do you need from us?’ ”
Subtle influences The cleverest national groups
— including FreedomWorks and Americans For Prosperity — forged alliances with local tea party groups, subtly influencing theirworkby providing resources and advice, but otherwise stayed out of the picture to maintain the movement’s appearance and self- image as a purely spontaneous, ground-up phenomenon. Tea partiers have reacted an-
grily whenever one group or an- other has tried to claim leader- ship over the movement. Last year, Judson Phillips, a
lawyer in Nashville, formed a group calledTeaPartyNationand announced the first-ever tea par- ty convention, in his hometown. The event drew heavy news me- dia attention and elevated Sarah Palin, the keynote speaker, as a movement leader. But tea par- tiers around the country lashed out against the convention as being anti-“tea.” The entry fee was $549; Palin was to be paid $100,000 toshowup. Phillipswas accused of trying to make a buck off the movement. Another large tea party orga-
nizer,TeaParty Express, is anarm of the Sacramento-based Repub- lican consulting firm Russo Marsh & Rogers. It has also come under criticism for grabbing the spotlight by anointing its candi- dates as the tea party pick, even when local tea party groups were supporting other contenders. “We’re still trying to figure out
the ‘hosts’ and ‘house guests’ terms of the relationships,” said Joe Wierzbicki, who works for Russo Marsh & Rogers and di- rects the Tea Party Express PAC. “The local group gets a bunch of people signed up and they get the membership, and we can help people put on rallies and bus tours, get talk radio involved. We’re a consulting firm with me- dia experts and the ability to put on events.We thought this was a very non-intrusive way to grow the network.” Tea Party Express lost favor
with many activists when its out- spoken chairman, talk-radio host Mark Williams, wrote a “satirical” letterfromthe “colored people” of America to Abraham Lincoln, in which he extolled slavery.He also called Obama “an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief.” Tea Party Express forced him
out, but the episode only rein- forced the belief among many tea party critics that the movement is fueled in part by racism against a black president. Tea partiers are especially sensitive to the charge. They say they should not be judged forwhat they describe as a small, unwelcome fringe element and they blame the news media for zeroing in on provocative, racially charged signs that can often be found at tea party rallies. Attention to this sort of discord
has faded in the wake of the tea party’s successes in this year’s primaries. It isn’t at all certain that the movement will be able to deploy with the same effect for the No- vember general elections, when many moderate voters will be turning out — including those turned off by the tea party. But in the weeks ahead, tea partiers will be out in force, operating phone banks, raising money, knocking on doors — and looking ahead, past2010 to2012,whenthey hope to be the loudest voice in deciding who will run against Obama. “Right now, we all have a com-
mongoal, all the different groups, the large groups, the local groups — and that is to prevent our country from continuing down this path of big spending and large government,” said Przybyls- ki, in Bucks County. “We’ve all had our rough moments, but we’re all working together, and I think it’s wonderful. We have proven as a movement that we can get people elected who stand with our principles. We’re not going to go asleep at the wheel again.”
gardnera@washpost.com
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