How The Tea Party Lost The 2012 Republican Primaries

[Alcibiades]

1. And yet I think the Tea Party was all about 2012

If you look at where the various tea parties had large events, they were all in battleground states: Ohio, Texas, Florida and Wisconsin. If this werre a true grassroots conervative movement, we might find many more events in the most conservative states, but that's the opposite of what happened. The distribution was extremely uneven--Ohio, particularly, stands out as an outlier. I believe that the Koch brothers and others funded the effort to bus people in: though a few events numbered more than 10,000, these were often the very same people. There was a concerted effort in battleground states, not the ones that were necessarily important in 2010, but the ones that will be important this year.

There were no large Tea Party events in SC. Karen Martin of the "South Carolina Patriots" has been all over the news media, but no one seems to ask how big her constituency is. If you go to their web site, you will see:

http://southcarolinapatriots.webs.com/apps/members/

Just 18 people have clicked the "join" button on the South Carolina Patriots web site, and yet, for some reason, this Karen Martin person is treated as though she represents a much larger constituency. If you cannot get more than 18 people to click the join button in conservative Sought Carolina, you're not a real grassroots movement.

The point is that this thing was phony all along. It has been the equivalent of the "Brooks Brothers Riot." It has no real followers, only leaders who are someone's payroll.