Long before the tea party movement became an American political phenomenon, Newt Gingrich chucked empty produce crates into the Chattahoochee River in Roswell as part of a tax day re-enactment of the Boston Tea Party.
The year was 1994, and the Georgia congressman was months away from reaching the apex of his political career as U.S. House speaker. As he now seeks the presidency, Gingrich casts himself as an intellectual forefather of the grass-roots movement that has redefined Republican politics, and as the man best suited to harness its energy against the “establishment” choice, Mitt Romney.
So far, tea party support remains fractured among the four remaining candidates in the GOP race, as each has aspects that turn off segments of the movement.
“They’re looking for someone with a spark that I think they’re not finding right now,” said Katie Egan, the Ohio state director of Americans for Prosperity, a tea party-driven organization based in Washington that promotes conservative causes.
Gingrich is attempting to capture that spark with rhetoric against “radical” President Barack Obama and “liberal” Romney, as well as stressing his early associations with tea parties.
“It’s fair to say I’ve had a long tradition of being interested in the tea party movement,” Gingrich told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, citing the 1994 protest and his speech at a tax day 2009 protest in New York.
Early supporter
Sharon Cooper’s tea party grew out of the early days of the last Democratic president: Bill Clinton. The east Cobb County nurse visited her congressman, Gingrich, on a whim one day in 1993. She was upset with Clinton administration policies — particularly its efforts to overhaul health care — and she wanted to join the fight against the White House. She volunteered for Gingrich, and one day she suggested he write a how-to book for citizens to get politically involved. “I’ll let you do it, Sharon,” he replied.
So during a period of about four weeks in early 1994 she wrote a book called “Taxpayers’ Tea Party,” instructing citizens how to write letters to the editor, get in touch with their elected representatives and the like. Gingrich promoted the book as he traveled the country orchestrating the 1994 Republican House takeover, including on tax day, when he and Cooper participated in demonstrations in Roswell and Boston.
“That was sort of an early tea party revolution,” said Cooper, who ran for the state House in 1996 and has been there ever since.
The current iteration of the tea party developed in February 2009, with Atlanta as a hotbed. Again a new Democrat in the White House, Barack Obama, was the target of protesters’ ire. The roots were in big government spending and bailouts, but the fires were stoked by Obama’s health care overhaul. From there, the movement took on all sorts of conservative causes. It helped drive another Republican House takeover in 2010 and pushed the GOP to the right.
A key question heading into the 2012 election became which presidential candidate would ride the tea party wave. Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Stockbridge businessman Herman Cain all had moments where they seized the zeitgeist, but all faded before the first votes were taken last month.
The remaining candidates — Gingrich, Romney, U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas and former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania — present different strengths and weaknesses for the discerning tea party voter, said Theda Skocpol, co-author of “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism.”
Gingrich is fondly remembered for the 1994 takeover, but his association with government-backed mortgage lender Freddie Mac is a stain that will not come out for many tea partyers, who blame the company in part for the mortgage crisis. Gingrich consulted for the company after he left Congress, though he said he encouraged his former colleagues not to give more money to Freddie Mac and its sister company, Fannie Mae, and he supports breaking them up.
Paul has talked about government spending and adherence to the Constitution for decades, but his libertarian views on foreign policy and drug legalization are less popular among tea partyers. Santorum is well-liked, particularly as a crusader against abortion and gay rights, but he is associated with the Republican spending excesses of the past decade.
Romney, Skocpol said, is the most aligned with the tea party on every issue — from his hard-line stance on illegal immigration to his pledges to scale back the government. The problem is that given his shifting positions over the years, many tea partyers do not believe him.
“Romney’s made headway,” Skocpol said. “I think there’s a lot of evidence that he’s made headway, at least in the proportion of tea partyers who have voted for him. But there’s no enthusiasm for him.”
The proportion of strong tea partyers supporting Romney has risen steadily, aside from his blowout win in all categories in New Hampshire. Still, each time Romney’s support among those voters was weaker than his overall support. (There were no entrance or exit polls conducted in the three states that voted Tuesday, all of which Santorum won.)
A new Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll of Georgia shows Gingrich leading widely among tea party members in the state: 45 percent to Romney’s 21 percent. The margin is wider than Gingrich’s overall lead of 43 percent to 29 percent.
Wendy Bloedt, the county coordinator for the Coweta Tea Party Patriots, is among Gingrich’s tea party supporters. She is volunteering as his Coweta County chairwoman for Georgia’s March 6 primary.
“I like that so many in the GOP establishment seem to be viscerally attacking him, because I believe it’s out of fear,” Bloedt said. “They know he will bring drastic change, and that’s why they are fighting him so hard.”
But Bloedt is not using her position to sway her tea party group to Gingrich. She remains neutral in official communications, though the members are well aware of her leanings. Bloedt said there is support for all four candidates among the group.
“They’re not going to go with me because I’m supporting a candidate,” she said. “They’re too independent-minded.”
In the interview, Gingrich said he is tapping into tea party networks through the Internet, particularly email. But few of the tea party groups are endorsing candidates themselves, as their members are split.
To many tea party adherents, the truest tea party candidate is Paul, whose constitutionally focused message — which he trumpeted long before the 2009 birth of the tea party movement — is in line with the tea party’s founding principles.
“What did the tea party stand for from the very beginning?” asked Bill Evelyn of the State of Georgia Tea Party. “It stood for the Constitution, fiscal responsibility and free markets. What’s the one candidate who stands for all of those things?”
As for Gingrich, Evelyn said he “can’t believe” how many tea party people are Gingrich fans, and he reeled off a litany of what he sees as Gingrich’s sins against the Constitution — including support for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the children’s health care entitlement SCHIP.
Still wary
Scott Rasmussen, founder of the Rasmussen Reports polling firm, said the number of self-described tea party members has dropped to 13 percent of all voters, about half of the movement’s 2010 peak. They are not much different from the Republican electorate as a whole, Rasmussen said, except they are “probably just a little more frustrated and in many cases a little newer to the political process.” (Twenty-seven percent of the respondents to the AJC poll identified themselves as tea party members.)
Skocpol said the tea party’s influence on Republican politics ensures that any GOP candidate is a tea party candidate. Witness the 2010 elections, in which Republicans who were not conservative enough faced primaries and those who were elected have been relentlessly held to account by activists in their states and districts.
The same goes for the Republican presidential nominee.
“It doesn’t matter who we put in office: The tea party, we watch everything,” Bloedt said. “We’re not stopping. We’ve learned our lesson about what happens when we don’t pay attention.”
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