A couple of weeks ago, a center-right Republican candidate for the Arizona state legislature made an off-the-record remark about the tea party movement. “The tea party is made up mostly of middle aged, middle class whites who woke up one morning and realized that America is very different from the country they grew up in, that the president is black, and they freaked out.”
I pooh-poohed this thesis, insisting that the tea party is a reaction to government overreach (“Don’t tread on me”) and addiction to tax-and-spend policies (“Taxed enough already”). The majority of tea partiers I’ve met, I insisted, are motivated by distrust of government and financial anxiety. But according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month, nearly three in 10 Americans see racial prejudice as underlying the tea party.
Perhaps the 30% confuse a preponderance of white tea partiers with bigotry. In his April 27 column, Dennis Prager reflected on the Left’s moral disqualification of the tea party movement based on the skin color of its members. “One would hope that all people would assess ideas by their moral rightness or wrongness, not by the race, gender or class of those who hold them. But in the world of the Left, people are taught not to assess ideas but to identify the race, class and gender of those who espouse those ideas.”
Aside from the demographic make-up of the tea partiers, messaging, or branding, also poses a challenge. The tea party movement isn’t centralized or monolithic. Even though umbrella groups, including Tea Party Patriots (which endorses) and Tea Party Nation (which doesn’t), attempt to coordinate tea party messaging, local groups have their own identities and priorities, even in the same city or town. The very strength of the tea party movement, its ability to empower ordinary citizens in grassroots political action, has the potential to be a liability.
Perception, as they say, is reality. And the tea party is like any political group in that it needs to guard against being perceived as racist or reactionary. An upcoming East Valley Tea Party program features John Birch Society president John McManus speaking on “Stealing the American Dream.” Although one doesn’t hear much about the John Birch Society these days, the group is best known for New World Order conspiracy theories. A letter attached the invitation soliciting advertisements for the program speaks of the “aliens who…now occupy our nation.” [emphasis added]
Tea party candidates are winning in some primaries, but Republicans are nervous about whether they will be able to beat their Democratic opponents in the fall. The acceptability of the tea party itself by moderate Republican and Independent voters may well affect the electability of these candidates.
Amy H Laff is a StateBrief.com partner. A graduate of Univ of Penn and Stanford Law School, Amy practiced law and mediation on the east coast before relocating to the Valley, where she founded and chairs the AZ chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition. Amy makes frequent media appearances, including AZ Law Channel and Tony Katz Radio Spectacular. Additionally, she works with companies and candidates on branding and communication. 
I will grant you, Amy, that not every tea party activist is a racist. But when prominent TP candidates and supporters like Rand Paul, Jake Knotts, Jim DeMint and JT Ready make racist comments, it reflects negatively on all TP activists. The party is losing steam, which was inevitable after Dick Armey lost control of this astroturf movement created in the warroom of the Republican Party.
Sadly, whatever good might have come from this movement has been co-opted by the lunatic fringe right, where, even in this day and age, you’ll still find racists. When you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.
As for the Dennis Prager quote, that’s total hogwash. If Prager’s ideas were true, I’d believe him because I am white and male. Nonsense.
I’ll grant you that Prager tends to overgeneralize, but I’ve certainly seen a tendency on the Left (from whence I came) to identify groups according to their demographics rather than their ideologies. And although generally I haven’t found tea party members to be racist, I wish they would distance themselves from fringy organizations like the John Birch Society. JT Ready and Jake Knotts are just jerks. I don’t think they’re capable of co-opting the TP movement.
Funny how the left is always ready to brand anyone who is to the right of Karl Marx a racist when they in fact are the racists. While we in the S. W. Valley Tea Party Patriots and the LD 16 Republicans don’t have a lot of POC’s in our midst, those that are with us are welcome and accepted and enjoyed as brothers and sisters of the family. We are all of the same mind. We have nothing against helping out anyone who wants to help himself, but not a great deal of sympathy for those who wish to be perpetual victims and stay that way letting all those rich people that actually work for a living pay their bills. We would be happy, thrilled to pieces actually, to have more POC’s who could help us to reeducate the true victims of the democratic machine so that they could finally throw off the chains imposed on them by the nanny welfare state. It’s too bad that people like demmessagecenteraz’s first thought is about racism when they in fact need a bit of reeducation themselves. And it also funny that most of the POC’s(People of Color) that I know and associate with are hard working straight shooters who feel the same way I do. As McCain is so ready to say, “Character matters.”, not skin color or national origin or almost anything else. Too bad many on the left are characters without character.
Ron