Friday, October 28, 2011

Tea Party Influence: The Case of TeaParty.com

By Michael Johns

Chances are good that you have never heard of the Canadian rock band, The Tea Party. Formed in 1993, the band broke up briefly in 2005, recording seven albums in their largely unremarkable 15-year career. The band's most popular album, The Edges of Twilight (released in 1995), sold 270,000 copies. None of their songs have ever received wide airplay in the United States, but two of their most successful ones, "Lullaby" and "Soulbreaking," did rise to third on the Canadian Singles Chart. The band's 42-year-old lead vocalist Jeff Martin, from Windsor, Ontario, looks the part, slightly resembling a crossbreed between The Doors' Jim Morrison and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder.

And should you find yourself in Saskatoon, a city in central Saskatchewan, on November 20, you can catch the band live at a 20,000-square-foot venue called the Odeon Events Centre. But chances are you won't be in Saskatoon that day, if ever.

What does make the band hugely relevant, however, is that it owns the Internet domain name, teaparty.com, and that ownership may now be its key to seven-figure riches as the Tea Party movement continues its ascent as the largest and most influential grassroots movement in U.S. political history. Not oblivious to the growing influence of the Tea Party movement, the band retained Boston-based Sedo, a domain brokerage firm, to sell its domain name. “It’s very rare when a domain name of this value and significance becomes available – especially one that is so timely and relevant,” Kathy Nielsen, Sedo's director of sales, said in an October 15 press release.

Earlier this week, Nielsen told Politico's Patrick Gavin that Sedo beat out 30 other firms in bidding for the exclusive right to sell the teaparty.com domain. So far, she says, they have received eight offers for it, and she predicts that the domain will sell within the next 30 days.

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Monday, October 24, 2011

The Tea Party and Mitt Romney

By Michael Johns

Among the tea party movement's many political and policy accomplishments, it is now well established that the movement has positioned itself as the most influential force in determining the 2012 Republican Presidential nominee. But while the movement's political influence is indisputable, its precise political preference in the 2012 Presidential election remains less clear. Each Republican candidate can point to some degree of support within the tea party movement, and several candidates--such as Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain and Ron Paul--can even boast that the tea party movement constitutes a substantial foundation of their respective national political support.

And then there is Mitt Romney. The former Massachusetts governor may well represent the most significant paradox and challenge to the tea party since the movement's 2009 founding. While the Tea Party is unified in the objective of removing President Barack Obama in 2012, it is less clear whether the movement is prepared to select a candidate such as Romney, whose conservatism remains in question over his continued support for the 2008 bank bailouts and a mandatory state health insurance policy that he instituted during his governorship. "Romney is not a conservative," conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh stated unequivocally earlier this month.

Yet, according to a Gallup Poll released earlier this month, Romney remains competitive among self-identified tea party voters, garnering the support of 17 percent of them. That places him substantially behind frontrunner Herman Cain, who is preferred among 27 percent of tea party voters, and one point behind Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is preferred among 18 percent of these voters. But it places him ahead of the six remaining Republican Presidential candidates, several of whom are self-declared tea party candidates: Bachmann, Paul, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Jr., Gary Johnson and Rick Santorum.

Despite his third place showing in the recent Gallup Poll, however, several tea party groups and leaders remain adamantly opposed to his candidacy. "I don’t know of a single tea party person who likes or supports Romney,” Andrew Hemingway, chairman of the Republican Liberty Caucus of New Hampshire, told The New York Times this past August. The Washington, D.C.-based group FreedomWorks, which has been supportive of the tea party movement, similarly has derided Romney, with FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe stating that "if every political opportunist claiming to be a tea partier is accepted unconditionally, then the tea party brand loses all meaning."

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Friday, October 21, 2011

An Emerging Tea Party Anthem?

By Michael Johns

Music has long had a foothold in many national protest movements. For the tea party movement, which is now arguably the largest such movement in American history, a growing number of music groups and songs have proven appealing, receiving play at the thousands of tea party events held nationally since the movement's 2009 launch. To date, however, no singular song or group has received the broad embrace that, say, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young did by the liberal protest movement of the 1970s, which embraced songs like "Woodstock" and "Ohio" as reflective of their movement's ethos.

For the tea party movement, however, all this may be beginning to change, The New York Times reports. Krista Branch's "I Am America" is now receiving growing play at various tea party rallies and has been adopted as a campaign theme song for tea party-supported Herman Cain's Presidential campaign. "The first time I heard that song, the message was so right-on I felt goose bumps just listening to it," Cain told The New York Times.

The song's lyrics, authored by Branch and her husband, were inspired by the tea party movement and depict the arrogance of a governing elite who ignore and demean the sentiments of the American people. "Pay no attention to the people in the street, crying out for accountability. Make a joke of what we believe, say we don't matter cause you disagree," Branch sings in the song.

Branch says the tea party movement's most unifying theme is that America is the greatest nation on Earth. The tea party movement, she says, is "not so much a rebellion as a love for this nation and a love for freedom."

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Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Tea Party Nothing Like OWS

By Michael Johns

In terms of its influence, clarity of its policy agenda, and number of supporters, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement fails to match that of America's tea party movement, whose membership ranks have swollen to the tens of millions these past two years and whose organization and passion in 2010 changed the leadership of Congress. Yet OWS's anti-establishment, anti-corporate, and anti-bailout themes have caught on surprisingly quickly, making it perhaps inevitable that media comparisons would be drawn between the two national protest movements.

But how much do the two movements really have in common? Not too much, say both political analysts and tea party leaders and activists. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Republican political pro and Fox News commentator Karl Rove contends that "Occupy Wall Street isn't a movement. It's a series of events populated by a weird cast of disaffected characters, ranging from anarchists and anti-Semites to socialists and LaRouchies."

While the OWS movement has garnered large national media attention, especially due to a sizable number of arrests and clashes with police at its events, its size is dwarfed by the tea party. Writing in The Washington Post, conservative columnist George Will observed correctly that fewer people have participated in all OWS events to date than participated in just one tea party event, the September 11, 2009 rally on the Washington, D.C. mall. "In comportment, OWS is to the Tea Party as Lady Gaga is to Lord Chesterfield," Will wrote.

Meanwhile two national Tea Party organizations have been quick to distance themselves from OWS. "The left is trying to create a counter force to the tea party, but it’s almost laughable that anyone is comparing the two, because they’re totally different," Tea Party Express strategist Sal Russo told Politico. In a fundraising appeal, Tea Party Express contrasted the two movements through photos, including Tea Party members, dressed patriotically, saying the Pledge of Allegiance along with OWS members clashing with police. “Why can’t the media tell the difference between these two [sets of] photos?” Tea Party Express asked, urging Tea Party members to “stand up to these comparisons and stand up for our principles."

Another national Tea Party organization, Tea Party Patriots, sent their members an e-mail with the title, "Occupy Wall Street? They're no Tea Partiers."

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Tea Party Agenda: Restore American Greatness

By Michael Johns

History will likely record that the emergence of the 21st Century American tea party movement was sparked by a visceral national rejection of some of the most statist, unconstitutional, and threatening progressive policy proposals in the nation’s history. It also will likely record that, since the movement’s 2009 launch, it has succeeded on multiple levels: Engaging tens of millions of liberty-loving Americans in the American political process, defeating (or holding at bay) some of the worst policy proposals of this administration, and proving a demonstratively effective grassroots political force in elections throughout the nation.

So is the tea party succeeding? Held against even the most ambitious expectations that existed among those of us who participated in some of the first national tea party conference calls and events in early 2009, the answer is clearly yes. The movement now holds household brand recognition. It is justifiably feared and routinely (even if unjustifiably) disparaged by the Obama White House and the Washington establishment. And, as the nation inches ever closer to the 2012 national elections, it is proving the most intriguing political force in the nation. In short, the tea party movement is now the most influential and fastest-growing center-right political movement in American history, which of course is no small achievement.

Yet, despite these laudable successes, the tea party’s biggest challenges likely lie ahead of it, especially for this singular reason: History dictates that opposing an existing political ideology (as the tea party movement is doing successfully) is a vastly easier undertaking than providing a comprehensive, alternative governing policy agenda, which the movement is only now beginning to do in earnest. The development and advancement of that policy agenda, combined with continued improvements in the movement’s operational and organizational capabilities, are likely the most important next steps in the movement’s continued maturation and will be instrumental factors in the reach of the movement’s long-term success and longevity.

This coming challenge raises a simple question: Having followed the tea party movement now for two years, the nation understands what the tea party opposes. But what does the tea party movement support? The answer to this question is paramount, and likely includes the following:

First, a rigid adherence by government to the United States Constitution and our founders’ vision of a federal government limited in both size and scope. As has been proposed in the Enumerated Powers Act, first championed by Congressman John Shadegg (R-AZ) and since by others, the tea party movement believes Congress needs to begin detailing the empowering Constitutional authorities that permit the legislation that it proposes and adopts. Had the Enumerated Powers Act been in effect in 2010, it is highly likely that legislation requiring Americans to purchase health insurance (whether they want it or not) would have been immediately discarded as not meeting even a minimal threshold of Constitutional permissibility (regardless of what one thinks of the policy itself). Consistent with this agenda, the Tea Party movement also has been appropriately engaged in reigning in an imperial Supreme and federal court system that has routinely ruled in extra-Constitutional ways, undermining individual and property rights and threatening the very fabric of the nation’s rule of law.

Second, a tax system that is vastly simplified and less burdensome. While the Tea Party movement draws its name from the famous 1773 tax rebellion of American colonists against the British colonial government and the monopolistic East India Company, the acronym T.E.A, standing for Taxed Enough Already, also has appropriately been used as a motto for the movement. As the Tea Party movement has correctly observed, one of the primary roles of government is to create an economic climate that best permits the creation of jobs and prosperity for its citizens.

Achieving this requires job-creating entities, such as corporations and small businesses, to maintain a sufficient cash flow and capital reserve to afford the hiring of new workers at competitive wages. Yet, in the midst of one of the nation’s deepest recessionary economic climates with unemployment hovering near double digits, the United States continues to tax American corporations at a 40 percent rate, which is now the second highest in the world. Once the economic engine of the world, the United States has — as a direct result of its own public policies — become a less and less appealing nation for job-creating entities and millions of American jobs have been lost, transferred to other nations with less prohibitive tax and regulatory policies. Individual taxes have been equally punitive. Today, the average American family sends in excess of $20,000 in federal taxes annually to Washington, reducing their ability to meet fundamental needs and decreasing their ability to be charitable within their communities. They also continue to be burdened by a death tax, also opposed by the tea party movement, that destroys wealth and discourages investment.

The tea party movement also is vocal in its position that the U.S. tax code has become incomprehensibly complex and increasingly so with each passing year. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) regulations and codes now contain 5.6 million words, seven times as many as the Bible. In the past decade alone, the regulations and codes have tripled in length, and it is now an uncontested fact that even the typical IRS customer service representative cannot routinely explain the code’s many complexities, which is a direct product of a government that has become too large and unruly, influenced by special interests run amok.

Third, a commitment to limiting government’s reach in the provision of goods and services. The federal government’s intrusion in assuming ownership of banks, mortgage and insurance companies, automobile companies, and other traditionally private sector industry segments threatens the very fabric of a free market economy and has been a core focus of tea party condemnation. In some respects, this reach has been facilitated by the failure of government (and federal courts) to recognize the Constitutional limitations of government, but it has also been fueled by a conscious and somewhat successful effort by this administration to undermine the core foundations of free market capitalism and expand government’s reach in becoming a provider of goods and services.

The tea party movement believes the proven inclination of the federal government to intervene in bailing out, and even assuming ownership of, private sector companies has created a dangerous economic climate that has undermined market-based and fiscally responsible decision making.

Fourth, substantial cuts in overall federal government spending. Not since World War II has federal spending and deficits, calculated as a percentage of GDP, run as high as they have under the Obama administration. As a percentage of GDP, federal spending now stands at 25 percent of total GDP. Deficits stand at 10 percent of GDP. And the federal government now routinely runs annual deficits exceeding $1 trillion (with no sign of substantial reductions in that anytime soon). This excessive federal spending hurts the American economy in numerous ways. It continues to build a culture of dependency in the nation that ultimately could ensure a vastly expanded, intrusive federal government for generations to come. It misallocates efficient resources, often through programs that do not generate wealth or prosperity and detract ever-growing numbers of Americans from the private sector at great opportunity cost. And not infrequently, these programs are wasteful, or politicized, or counterproductive, or all of these combined.

Since its formation, perhaps no issue has resonated more with the tea party movement than the fact that our federal government is simply too large, growing too fast, and threatening — by its very size alone — the vision our founding fathers articulated of a federal government limited in both size and span of functional responsibilities.

Each of these four issues is considered domestic or fiscal in nature, and the question is routinely asked whether the tea party movement has, or intends to, develop better articulated national security, foreign, and social policy proposals.

My response to this question typically has been two-fold: First, I do not believe the tea party movement is as divided on these additional issues as liberal media have sought to portray. Most tea party leaders and activists I have encountered believe that there are disturbing social trends in the nation, including the multiple problems arising from the federal government’s failure to secure its borders, the ever-alarming number of abortions (now exceeding 4,000 a day) that continue to be performed in the U.S. and the urgent need for further choice and accountability in primary education. In foreign policy and defense matters, while some tea party leaders believe the U.S. is overextended abroad, most also share Ronald Reagan’s vision that American strength, not weakness, represents the best chance for peace and freedom.

Yet, second, there also appears to be an understandable reluctance to complicate the Tea Party message by broadening the issues of its focus and potentially limiting the movement’s size and influence. For these reasons, the driving principles of adherence to the U.S. Constitution, the need for tax relief and tax code simplification, and the reigning in of a vastly bloated federal government appear to be the unifying principles that will continue to unite the influential and ever-growing tea party movement.

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