SAN ANTONIO (AP) —
Three years ago he was merely a face in a very large crowd, standing
outside the Alamo on Tax Day as Glenn Beck spoke of drawing a line in
the sand.
A businessman, husband, father of five and grandfather
of 14, Bruce Baillio bought a miniature "Don't Tread on Me" flag and
watched, a little sheepishly and mostly silently, as a movement was born
before his eyes. Like most of America, he didn't know then what the tea
party was.
Today, he is part of what it is morphing into.
Twice
a month at the Jim's Restaurant not far from his home, Baillio unloads
tea party T-shirts and baseball caps, sets an American flag on a Formica
table and leads his neighborhood tea party group — one of 23 in the San
Antonio area — in a discussion. They talk about the Obama
administration's policies regarding insurance for birth control, about
how to become a delegate to the conventions that help determine the
Texas GOP's leaders and platform.
He does this every first and
third Tuesday of the month, even though he knows some are already
writing the tea party's obituary. In this, the first presidential
campaign since the dawn of the movement, no single contender has been
christened the "tea party candidate." And what was once the boisterous
focus of American politics is now the butt of Internet insult: "Ding
Dong — the Tea Party is dead!" wrote one blogger.
"Are we dead?"
Baillio asked several of his members on a recent Tuesday. About 15 had
gathered on this night, including retired military men, grandmothers, a
few real estate brokers, a city utility worker, a high school Spanish
teacher and a photographer.
Their responses were steeped in the
kind of confidence that comes with clout, and the San Antonio Tea Party
has gained some of that.
"We're persistent and keep driving the issues home," said one member.
"We communicate with each other and ... when it comes time to vote, we'll definitely pull the ballot lever," replied another.
And
there was this, from an ex-Air Force man wearing a "Vote. Declare
Yourself" shirt: "We're becoming active in things that we didn't even
think about before this all began ... and we are finding that our
difference is very, very tall. All they're doing when they call us dead
is creating something called silent resentment."
Dead the tea
party is not. Changed? Perhaps. But still very much alive, in the back
room of a Jim's Restaurant in San Antonio and many other places across
the land.
___
It screamed onto the scene with a memorable
rant by a reporter on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Then
came the giant Tax Day rallies. The jeers at town hall meetings about a
still fledging national health care proposal. Protests in Washington,
D.C., with Beck, and bus tours featuring Sarah Palin.
It all
culminated with the tide-turning elections of 2010, when the tea party
revolution sent new conservatives to governors' mansions, statehouses
and, of course, Congress — helping to fuel the largest turnover in the
U.S. House in more than 70 years.
But where has the tea party been
since? It's a common question, especially as many saw the GOP
presidential campaign unfolding without any meaningful tea party
influence. Sure, there was a Tea Party Express rally last fall in New
Hampshire, featuring most of the Republican presidential hopefuls. And,
later, that same group co-sponsored a debate with CNN.
Still,
so-called "umbrella" organizations such as the Tea Party Express, the
Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks and others haven't, to date, put their
names behind any one candidate. And only in recent weeks have tea party
darlings such as U.S. senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Mike Lee of
Utah finally weighed in — endorsing likely nominee Mitt Romney, the
former Massachusetts governor whom some see as un-tea-party-like as one
could be, in part because of his state's own health care reform law.
Some
local tea party groups (in Massachusetts, for example) have divided
over divergent priorities — whether to make conservative economic
principals or conservative social issues paramount. Others, such as the
Tennessee Tea Party, have disbanded altogether.
In researching her
recent book, "The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican
Conservatism," Harvard professor Theda Skocpol found that about 1,000
local tea party groups formed in 2009-2010. Today, she estimates there
are about 600. A declining number, yes, but still what Skocpol, an
expert on civic engagement, calls "a very good survival rate."
"They're
not dressing up and going to demonstrations in the street. They're
meeting. They're poring over the legislative records of these
Republicans that they've elected. They're contacting their
representatives, and they're keeping the pressure on. They're following
the debates, and they're going and they're voting.
"They're determined," she says, "and they haven't gone away."
To
weigh the continuing success or influence of the tea party by
inside-the-Beltway measures — endorsements, numbers of chapters and
"constituents," dollars or even wins or losses at the polls — is to miss
the point and ignore the power of the movement today, says Skocpol.
That stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the tea party was
and is.
It was never an "it," a party with a capital "P'' in the
sense of a third political party, though at one point some tea party
insiders may have toyed with the idea and outsiders treated it almost as
such. (Consider CNN's decision to televise the tea party response to
President Obama's 2011 State of the Union address.)
Rather, it is
an ideology and a style of politics — one that "has been in the business
of pulling the Republican Party away from the possibility of
compromising with Democrats and further toward the hard right," says
Skocpol. "And they've been very successful. ... They've taken over the
Republican Party, lock, stock and barrel."
Elizabeth Price Foley, a
constitutional law professor and author of "The Tea Party: Three
Principles," calls the tea party "the new Republican base." ''That
causes a lot of people who want to dismiss the tea party to characterize
them as puppets of some great wealthy conservative puppet masters," she
says. "If anything, the tea party is the one who is moving the
mountain. The mountain being the Republican Party."
This was on
full display during last summer's congressional debt debate, when House
tea partyers forced Republican Speaker John Boehner to postpone a vote
on legislation to raise the debt ceiling and hastily revise it to add a
balanced-budget provision, pushing the government to the brink of
default. It was just one example of the strength exerted by newly
elected tea party Republicans advocating a tough no-compromise mantra.
Earlier, they drove House Republican leadership to rewrite a budget bill
to find more spending cuts.
Today, tea party activists are still
hard at work promoting a conservative ideology at all levels of
government, in part by targeting longtime GOP incumbents deemed not
conservative enough. Take this year's congressional races. Though no one
expects the type of gains seen in 2010, national tea party-related
groups are backing candidates in vital races as part of an effort to not
only keep GOP control of the House but possibly gain control of the
Senate and move Congress more to the right.
Already, in what some
have dubbed the first upset of 2012, an incumbent congresswoman in Ohio
has fallen to a tea party-backed challenger in that state's primary.
Still to come are the two high-profile primaries featuring tea party
targets Orrin Hatch of Utah and Richard Lugar of Indiana, the two most
senior Republican members of the Senate.
FreedomWorks, a
Washington, D.C.-based group that provides both money and training for
tea party activists and candidates, has spent some $650,000 opposing
Hatch, whom the group calls "the consummate Washington insider" with a
record that "is decidedly opposed to the goals of the tea party" — in
part because he voted for the Wall Street bailout in 2008.
The
78-year-old Hatch, first elected in 1976, faces several challengers at
an April 21 GOP state convention. It was at that meeting two years ago
that tea partyers notched their first congressional victory, defeating
three-term Republican Sen. Bob Bennett.
Lugar, who like Hatch is
seeking a seventh term, may face a bigger threat in his May 8 primary.
State Treasurer Richard Mourdock has been endorsed by a coalition of
Indiana tea party groups called Hoosiers for a Conservative Senate but
also by national organizations including FreedomWorks, the anti-tax Club
for Growth and the Tea Party Express, some of which have spent several
hundred thousands of dollars supporting Lugar's opponent.
There is
evidence of the tea party's influence, too, in the campaign of Romney,
even if many harbor deep suspicions that he is a Massachusetts moderate.
He has begun promoting some tea party-friendly positions, including a
plan to partially privatize Medicare. And his stump speeches are
sprinkled with lines that play to the tea party crowd, whether he's
denouncing "career politicians" or imparting the virtues of the
Constitution and the founding fathers or accusing President Barack Obama
of wanting to "fundamentally transform" America and turn it into a
"European-style entitlement society" with "burdensome regulations" that
expand the role of government.
"To be successful in politics you
have to be connected to the zeitgeist of the times. The tenor of the
times today ... is opposition to the increasing size, cost and
intrusiveness of the federal government," says Sal Russo, a veteran GOP
political strategist who runs the Tea Party Express political action
committee. "All of the candidates have successfully addressed the
primary tea party issue in a way that tea party people would like. I
hear people say (the GOP primary was) a titanic struggle between the tea
party and the non-tea partyers. That's silly."
Perhaps nowhere is
the persistent power of the tea party more at work today than at the
local and state level, where many grassroots activists have decided to
shift the focus of their efforts. More tea party-backed candidates are
running for county and state Republican leadership positions, with the
aim of having a bigger say in the party's agenda and direction.
It's
happened in South Carolina, Florida, Arizona, Minnesota and Ohio, where
the head of the state GOP resigned this month after a much-publicized
battle between him and the governor, as well as tea party groups that
aligned against him.
Another notable example is New Hampshire,
where tea party organizer and former gubernatorial candidate Jack
Kimball was elected GOP chairman in January 2011 by conservatives. Soon,
GOP presidential hopefuls were reaching out to Kimball in that
first-in-the-nation primary state. But Kimball stepped down eight months
later amid infighting with the state's top Republican elected leaders,
who questioned his ability to manage the organization and raise funds.
There
have been other signs of backlash against the tea party, both within
the GOP establishment and among the public at large. In New Hampshire,
where Republicans in 2010 won supermajorities in both the state House
and Senate, a recent poll of GOP primary voters found most saying they
no longer support the tea party movement. That echoes a November Pew
Research Center poll, which found waning support nationwide for the tea
party but also in those congressional districts now represented by
members of the House Tea Party Caucus.
In Indiana, a video popped
up on YouTube urging voters to reject tea party candidates to the
Madison County Republican Party in that state's upcoming May primary,
telling viewers: "If you care about the real Republican Party, you must
act now before it's too late," The Herald Bulletin newspaper reported.
In
Florida, the state GOP chair removed the local head of the Volusia
County Republican Executive Committee after a battle between him and
more conservative Republicans. A tea party activist is now in charge,
and that prompted one GOP political consultant to write a scathing
online column urging Republicans to "resist the temptations and blind
allegiance to ... any group that would be so arrogant as to want to
change the party by disrupting it and destroying it."
Still, tea
party observers such as Foley and Skocpol say the movement may be here
to stay. The tea party, says Foley, is "in the fabric of every
community. You may not see it, because they're not holding signs. But
they're there."
And, she adds, "They're in it for the long haul."
___
To better grasp the evolution of the movement, simply follow the journeys of its people.
In
March 2010, Hildy Angius, a retired public relations specialist, drove
from her condo in Bullhead City, Ariz., to the huge tea party rally in
Searchlight, Nev. — what some called the Woodstock of conservatism.
Then, she was president of her local Republican women's club. Now, she
serves as vice chair of the Mohave County Republican Party and is
running for county supervisor.
"I think we realized that just
getting together ... and yelling and screaming wasn't going to do
anything," says the 52-year-old Angius. "The best thing is to get
involved at the local level in the party. Move the local party to the
right ... and then the local party will move the state and then the
state moves the national.
"The tea party was an idea that people
like me, who came from nowhere, could get involved ... and you can
really make a difference."
In San Antonio, 60-year-old Bruce Baillio now feels the same.
After
the Tax Day rally of 2009, he went home, set his tea party flag aside
and went on with life, keeping up with politics but not getting
involved. Then he read about a Houston tea party group's call for poll
watchers to prevent what they considered possible election fraud. He was
trained as an election judge and, urged on by a fellow church member
who now serves as head of the San Antonio Tea Party, began attending his
neighborhood tea party meetings. Soon enough, he was leading the group.
Today,
he and other tea party members have the clout to meet privately with
elected officials and press them to hold the line on city projects,
including a proposal to spend millions to build new housing in the
downtown core.
"We are showing up at city council meetings on a
regular basis, showing up at county commission meetings on a regular
basis. We have organized neighborhood groups to attend town hall
meetings," says San Antonio Tea Party president George Rodriguez. "It is
at those meetings that we bring up the issues of: How are you using our
money?"
Political candidates are also coming to them, seeking votes and volunteers.
That
Tuesday night in San Antonio, three candidates showed up to court
Baillio's members, including Matt Beebe, a conservative newcomer taking
on the speaker of the Texas House in the state's May 29 primary. Beebe
credited tea party groups like Baillio's for paving the way for more
conservative candidates to seek office.
"The tea party ... has
provided a backdrop where the opportunity to beat an entrenched
incumbent exists," he says. "They're putting their money where their
mouth is. They're putting their time and effort where their mouth is,
and so I feel like they are absolutely significant."
This, Baillio
says, is "the new normal" — his group of citizen activists who may not
dress up in revolutionary garb, make signs and converge on large
rallies, but instead work behind the scenes to influence their democracy
in myriad ways.
"We have definitely changed the dialogue. People
now have to consider the tea party," he says. "Are we a paper tiger? I
think that's our biggest fear. And the answer to that question is in our
own hands. We get to decide. It's about who else can we educate. Who
else can we wake up?"
___
Pauline Arrillaga, a Phoenix-based national writer for The Associated Press, can be reached at features(at)ap.org.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.