bobbyw24
02-18-2010, 12:36 PM
If any one person is the founder, it's Rick Santelli. A year ago, the CNBC commentator blew a gasket on the air over a plan by the Obama Administration to tackle the foreclosure crisis. Multibillion-dollar proposals were flying like snowflakes in Washington, and Santelli's rant struck a chord with people who wondered where all the money would come from. "We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party," Santelli declared, evoking the 1773 protest in Boston Harbor. A movement was born. Egged on by conservative interest groups and leveraging Barack Obama's digital-networking strategies, grass-roots opponents of the President's agenda have made themselves a major factor in U.S. politics.
Naming the Tea Party movement, however, is easier than defining it. Tea Partyism covers a lot of ground and a world of contradictions. It contains Nashville lawyer Judson Phillips, who recently organized the first Tea Party convention at the posh Gaylord Opryland Hotel, charging $549 per ticket and pocketing an undisclosed profit. But the movement also embraces the volunteers who denounced Phillips and his convention as a money-grubbing mistake. The crowd in Nashville cheered as speaker Joseph Farah demanded proof that Obama is a U.S. citizen. "Show us the birth certificate!" Farah cried. But other Tea Partyers were equally delighted when influential blogger Erick Erickson responded to Farah soon afterward by banishing "birthers" from his blog, RedState. "The Tea Party movement is in danger of getting a bad reputation" by courting conspiracists, Erickson wrote.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1964903,00.html#ixzz0fujQP0PE
Naming the Tea Party movement, however, is easier than defining it. Tea Partyism covers a lot of ground and a world of contradictions. It contains Nashville lawyer Judson Phillips, who recently organized the first Tea Party convention at the posh Gaylord Opryland Hotel, charging $549 per ticket and pocketing an undisclosed profit. But the movement also embraces the volunteers who denounced Phillips and his convention as a money-grubbing mistake. The crowd in Nashville cheered as speaker Joseph Farah demanded proof that Obama is a U.S. citizen. "Show us the birth certificate!" Farah cried. But other Tea Partyers were equally delighted when influential blogger Erick Erickson responded to Farah soon afterward by banishing "birthers" from his blog, RedState. "The Tea Party movement is in danger of getting a bad reputation" by courting conspiracists, Erickson wrote.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1964903,00.html#ixzz0fujQP0PE