Tea Party Announces It Will Focus on Helping Republicans Win Senate

photo-teabag-liberal-demsAs you read through the Reuters story excerpted here, keep in mind that the two national tea party spokespeople quoted here are actually employees of Republican Party shadow groups:

WASHINGTON/CHICAGO (Reuters) – With their favored candidates for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination lagging or out of the race, many U.S. Tea Party activists are shifting focus to the struggle for control of the U.S. Senate.

The fizz has gone out of the presidential contest for some supporters of the fiscally conservative movement now that former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is not running and Texas Governor Rick Perry and congresswoman Michele Bachmann are slipping in polls.

“No one is going to get perfect in a general election candidate. That is why we think the Senate is a better place to focus,” said Matt Kibbe, president and chief executive of the libertarian FreedomWorks, a Tea Party group.

In the 2010 mid-term elections, Tea Party opposition to President Barack Obama’s policies played a big role in slashing the Democrats’ majority in the 100-member Senate to just six seats and eliminating their majority in the House of Representatives.

With 23 of the 33 Senate seats up for grabs next year now held by Democrats, and a wave of public hostility to incumbents, Tea Party activists said they looked forward to more Republican gains in 2012.

“We’ll maintain the House without a problem. We absolutely have to take back the Senate and focus on that and not let presidential politics consume all of our time and energy,” said Amy Kremer, chairwoman of the California-based Tea Party Express Political Action Committee.

Some of the eight to 10 Senate seats seen as very competitive next year are in Wisconsin, Florida and Ohio, states where Tea Party groups had a big impact in 2010 and during state legislative sessions, fueling optimism about next year, Kibbe said.

“If the issues are the economy and jobs, the burden of spending and the national debt, those are swing issues that Tea Partiers care about most — there is a nice confluence in what motivates independent voters and what motivates Tea Partiers,” he said.

Reuters is playing a game here by pretending not to know who these people really work for.

Matt Kibbe is president of FreedomWorks, which Reuters identifies as a libertarian group. In reality, FreedomWorks is an astroturf-enabling operation established by David Koch, one of the two infamous corporate oligarchic Koch brothers. Among its original co-chairs were former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey; former Republican vice presidential candidate and congressman, the late Jack Kemp; Reynolds tobacco heir C. Boyden Gray who served as White House Counsel to Republican Pres. George Bush I; and Bill Bennett, the Republican gambling and nicotine addict who served as drug czar under Bush I.

Amy Kremer is chairwoman of the California-based Tea Party Express Political Action Committee. Tea Party Express — the group that ran the buses around the country ginning up tea party mob rage against health-care reform and that paid Sarah Palin hundreds of thousands of dollars — is 100 percent astroturf. It is a front group operated by the GOP PR firm of Russo, Marsh and Rogers.

Let’s decode this Reuters report using the reality-based Enigma machine: After trying with one loser candidate after another in the Republican presidential primaries this year, the Republican Party’s extremist base has realized that the party’s establishment wing will choose the nominee for president next year. Therefore, the GOP base is moving on to a new target. It will spend its millions in astroturf funding to promote the election of an insane clown posse in the Senate similar to the half-wits it sent to the House last year, and who are now running the show there through their poodles, Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

What Reuters also fails to note is that tea partyists comprise around 20 percent of the electorate. The fact is they didn’t “win” the House in 2010. That is a numerically impossibility. And since support for the tea party is dropping, it won’t be numerically possible for them to hold the House, much less expand the tea party caucus in the Senate, on their own next year either.

What really happened in 2010 is that vote was more or less evenly divided among Republicans and Democrats, with the Republican vote equaling about 45 percent and the Democratic vote roughly the same. The House flipped because the remaining 10 percent of voters — mostly moderate independents — went lopsidedly 60/40 for GOP candidates, about 60 of whom were aligned with the tea party.

If disapproval of the tea party among independents remains constant over the next 12 months, the GOP fringe could actually end up helping Democrats in Senate races — especially if they field a roster of loser candidates similar to 2010 candidates like Joe Miller, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle.

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2 thoughts on “Tea Party Announces It Will Focus on Helping Republicans Win Senate”

  1. Here in Polk Co, we had a lot of Tea Party spouters. As time went on, they began to realize which way they were being led and stopped the bantering. They are still angry, but now also confused and misled. These are not dumb people, just ignorant of where to face thier anger. Now, it would be nice if these same people began to realize who Limbaugh really works for.

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