Late last year, Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation came to Eric Odom with a proposition. Odom’s group, the American Liberty Alliance–a free market, anti-tax group launched in March 2009, after its leaders had helped put together the first Tea Party protests–could sign on with the National Tea Party Convention that Phillips was organizing. ALA could promote the convention on its website and to its members. In return, it would become a “gold co-sponsor” of the convention, which would cost any other sponsor $5,000. That status would let Odom join other activists backstage with Sarah Palin, the event’s big-ticket speaker, before she gave her Saturday evening address. Odom signed up, and ALA joined the conservative women’s group Smart Girl Politics as the most prominent Tea Party groups promoting the event.

On January 12, Odom had to rethink his position. In the morning, he tried to convince local leaders of ALA that, despite some bad press coverage, the event was worth supporting. But at 2 p.m., Nashville-based Tea Party activist Kevin Smith posted a 6,700-word article on the “story behind Tea Party Nation’s dishonest beginnings.” In Smith’s account, Tea Party Nation had become a scam, promoting its own welfare while alienating local grassroots activists. The high cost of the convention–full-access tickets were $549, while access to Palin’s speech alone was $349. “It’s become clear to me that Judson and his for-profit Tea Party Nation Corporation are at the forefront of the GOP’s process of hijacking the tea party movement,” Smith wrote. “How can I honestly object to this same behavior in my Government and demand they clean up Washington when I am unwilling to risk the personal and political injury it takes to expose the fraud, corruption, and deceit to which I am privy?”

Smith’s attack on Tea Party Nation jumped from e-mail inbox to e-mail inbox. Hours later, 25 of ALA’s organizers told Odom that they wanted to pull out of the convention. Shortly after midnight, Odom announced that that ALA was quitting the convention because “when we look at the $500 price tag for the event and the fact that many of the original leaders in the group left over similar issues, it’s hard for us not to assume the worst.”

Since the first announcements about the National Tea Party Convention in November 2009, the high-priced, first-of-its kind event has been a magnet for controversy, a divisive subject within the burgeoning movement, and a punching bag for local and national media. Those three factors have complemented one another, as angry activists like Smith, Florida organizer Robin Stublen, and California organizer Mark Meckler have attacked the convention in very public forums. The attacks have remained one-sided as Phillips has blown off questions about the criticism. He has not responded to multiple phone calls and e-mails from TWI and from other outlets such as TPM Muckraker. Asked to confirm that Palin was being paid $100,000 to appear at the event, Phillips only told Politico that its reporters’ sources were “not reliable.” The result: A steady stream of negative press that has been circulated inside the movement, culminating in the high-profile withdrawal of ALA.

“I think it is a great con of people making money off the passions of others,” said Erick Erickson, the editor of RedState.com and sponsor of the biannual RedState Gathering convention, in an e-mail to TWI. “A $500+ per person fee to a for-profit organization run by people most people have never heard of is neither populist nor accessible for many tea party activists. It smells more like a scam using Sarah Palin to build legitimacy while lining pockets with money from hard working tea party activists.” After talking to TWI, Erickson put up a blog post making the argument in even more detail.

“When I’ve talked to our members, they’ve said this is entirely too expensive,” said Jenny Beth Martin, the national coordinator of Tea Party Patriots. The decision not to participate was made in a December conference call with members. “I’m sure there are other people in the movement who haven’t given as much, haven’t been organizing events, and may feel more comfortable spending that money, going to see some speakers, and getting that training. But we’re focusing on a grassroots response to the State of the Union and on the next round of Tea Parties on February 27.”

But as humiliating as the National Tea Party Convention’s coverage has been for activists, critics and attendees alike see the ambition and political strategy of their movement becoming more and more mainstream. Nine months ago, Odom got national headlines for pre-emptively denying RNC Chairman Michael Steele a speaking slot at the Chicago Tea Party. “We prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in government as well as political parties,” he said at the time. Today, Steele is winning a Tea Party Nation web poll on whether he should speak the convention, and Odom is gearing up for a trip to Massachusetts to help the Republican candidate, Scott Brown, take the state’s open Senate seat. The Tea Party Express, an operation of the GOP-supporting Our Country Deserves Better PAC which has been utterly rejected by some Tea Party activists, is rolling into the convention and catching hardly any flack for it. The presence of Palin, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) at the convention is seen, universally, as a coup with import that will outlive the controversy over the event itself.

“Having Palin speak at the convention works to to their mutual advantage,” said Morton Blackwell, the president of the Leadership Institute, an organization that trains conservatives (program veterans include James O’Keefe, the videographer who taped damaging exposes of ACORN) and is getting a discounted sponsorship at the National Tea Party Convention in return for holding free sessions. “It’ll help them get thousands of people there, I think. And the leadership of the Tea Parties, that I’ve talked to, do not believe that they should start their own party.”

Despite the negative press Palin has received for demanding so much money for her speech, there’s agreement that her presence will help convince activists that they need to work for Republicans. “Palin is actually more Tea Party than Republican Party, anyway–she walked away from the governor’s office, for crying out loud!” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform–which is still undecided on whether to support the convention, based on conflicting suggestions from local activists. “But it’s important that they realize that they don’t have to be friends with the guys they replace the Democrats with. They get them to run on their issues. That’s how you avoid third party movements.”

Some of the people planning to attend the convention are still considering whether third party challenges to the Democrats and the GOP are viable. David DeGerolamo of NC Freedom, who is spending “thousands of dollars” to travel from North Carolina to Nashville and run a breakout session on consolidating state Tea Party groups at the convention, speculated that it would be an ideal place to “weed out” people who had the money to challenge the two parties. “I’ll tell you,” said DeGerolamo, “the GOP here in North Carolina is scared to death about what will happen at the Tea Party Convention.”

But the chance of the Tea Party Convention becoming the start of a third party movement — something rumored for months and occasionally indulged by Palin — is remote. (On the January 13 episode of “Glenn Beck,” Palin admitted that “there are times that I have been tempted to bail from” the GOP but that she didn’t think third parties are viable.) The focus of detractors is on purifying the movement of buck-raking, but not Republican activism. The focus of convention defenders is While Kevin Smith’s explosive blog post warned against GOP exploitation, hours later the Louisiana Tea Party endorsed Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) for re-election.

“Sometimes, in conservative circles, you run into this purity test problem where any traction in political process is seen as selling out over principled,” said John O’Hara, a staffer at the libertarian Heartland Institute who helped organized the February 27 Tea Party in Washington, D.C. and whose book “New American Tea Party” hit shelves this week. “I’d hate to see the Tea Party relegated to a third party spoiler, and luckily I don’t think that’s happening.”

Neither Tea Party activists nor conservative movement figures who are linking up with them express much worry about the bad press the convention is getting. Some of the non-participants who’ve been quoted criticizing the convention, such as Adam Brandon of FreedomWorks, are fine with the media promoting the crusade of Odom, Stublen, and others while Brandon’s group quietly promotes its new PAC targeting vulnerable Democrats. “We wish them all the best, but we are too stretched on the health care bill,” Brandon told TWI.

And for all the bad press Tea Party Nation’s received, the very day the group announced extremely limited access for the media, its website revealed one profitable reason why.

“The First National Tea Party Convention is officially SOLD OUT!!!! You may place your name on the waiting list in the event additional tickets become available.”

[W]e have to respond to the concerns and wishes of our membership. And quite a few of our members have asked that we consider sitting this one out.

In summary, the controversy surrounding the event involves conversations about the infrastructure of the Tea Party Nation and the way its finances are channeled through private bank accounts and paypal accounts.

ALA was one of the most prominent Tea Party groups to sign onto the Convention–Tea Party Patriots took a pass. And the language Odom uses here echoes the critiques of convention skeptics. “[W]hen we look at the $500 price tag for the event and the fact that many of the original leaders in the group left over similar issues,” writes Odom, “it’s hard for us not to assume the worst.”

Newt Gingrich speaks at the New York City Tea Party on April 15 (Flickr: ajagendorf25)

When Lisa Miller found out that former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich would be signing books on Saturday in McLean, Va., she hauled out her video camera. Miller, a Virginia businesswoman and sometime Republican candidate for local office, had gone to every Tea Party event and town hall meeting that she could get into this year. Every time, she’d turned on her camera and recorded a short on-the-scene video editorial about what was at stake. “I’m asking for Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress to return our money,” she said in an April 15 video.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

[buttons1] She had a bone to pick with Gingrich. On October 16, the former Speaker of the House endorsed Dede Scozzafava, the Republican candidate for the open seat in New York’s 23rd Congressional District. He was the last high-profile Republican to do so. Since then, Republicans from Sarah Palin to Dick Armey to Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-Minn.) have endorsed Doug Hoffman, the Conservative Party candidate in the special election. If those politicians needed proof that they were doing right by the Republican base, they need only look to people like Miller and the twenty other Tea Party activists at the Barnes & Noble to demand an answer from Gingrich. In an organizing e-mail passed on to TWI, one activist suggested that they bring signs reading “Newt, You Know Better,” and grumbled that “if Tea Partiers can’t stop so-called conservatives from selling out, we might as well give up.”

The Tea Party activists got their time with Gingrich. His answer, uploaded to Miller’s YouTube account, made national news. “My bias is to be for the nominee of the local party,” Gingrich said, patiently, “and I don’t second guess the local party.” The Republican candidate had a better chance of winning the election, he argued, and it was foolish “for the conservative movement to think splitting in the special election is a smart idea.”

The day after meeting the Tea Party activists, Gingrich appeared on C-Span and announced, in a roundabout way, that he would consider a 2012 presidential bid. But as far as voters like Lisa Miller are concerned–and they’re echoed by some established Republican strategists–Gingrich has done serious damage to his credibility among the people who’ll choose the next Republican presidential nominee. Conservatives and libertarians who’d already doubted Gingrich have used the Scozzafava endorsement as a cudgel, a way to emphasize their own concerns.

“Newt’s hurt himself a little bit,” said David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and a pol with experience in intra-Republican squabbles that dates back to the Ronald Reagan-Gerald Ford primary battle of 1976. “It’s obviously not fatal, but if you go with the establishment all of the time, people assume that you’re part of the establishment. And that’s not a good place to be.”

Craig Shirley, a longtime Republican strategist who is working on Hoffman’s media outreach, called Gingrich a “friend” and would not disparage his decision. But he warned that “conservatives are going to point the finger at the NRCC and the Republican establishment for running hundreds of thousands of dollars on ads attacking Doug Hoffman.”

Online, the reaction to Gingrich’s decision has been swift and brutal. On October 22, he posted a lengthy explanation of his thinking on his Newt.org website, usually a hub for his fans. That posting has been drowned in negative comments, some sorrowful, some simply angry.

“You were the leader I was hoping the party could turn to,” wrote one commenter. “And then this…”

“It was people like Dede [Scozzafava] in Congress that got us to this point,” wrote another commenter. “You’re killing us!!”

“I was planning on voting for you in 2012,” wrote another commenter, “but that could be put on the back burner until I see the direction you are taking our country.”

Conservative opinion leaders have been just as rough, piling on Gingrich for mulling over a presidential run at the same time he defended Scozzafava.

“Newt for 2012?” wrote Michelle Malkin. “No thanks… constantly invoking Reagan isn’t going to erase the damage Gingrich has done to his brand over the years by wavering on core issues and teaming up with some of the Left’s biggest clowns.” Washington Times editorial writer Quin Hillyer wrote that Gingrich was “choking and sputtering” and had “lost touch with the concerns of the people he should be listening to.” Robert Stacy McCain, a conservative journalist whose occasional collaborator Lynn Vincent helped write Sarah Palin’s memoirs, labeled the former speaker “an unprincipled partisan hack.”

All of this comes after Gingrich–who polls well in potential 2012 primary tests–has put in several years cultivating the conservative base. In September, he appeared at Americans for Prosperity’s “Defending the American Dream” conference and talked about building a “non-partisan” conservative movement, with small-government activists entering both parties’ primaries to take the country back. In April, he even warned that a third party could rise up to replace the GOP if his party didn’t “break out of being the right-wing party of government” and apologize for its “big spending” ways under former President George W. Bush.

Bob Barr, a former House colleague of Gingrich who was the Libertarian Party’s 2008 nominee for president, chuckled when asked about the backlash to the former speaker’s turn away from that rhetoric. “Is anyone surprised?” asked Barr. “Newt’s not going to change. If conservatives are holding their breath about that, they’re doomed to die. It’s always good when these questions get asked about the Republican Party, but if you give up your principles to make sure the Democrats don’t win, that’s sort of a one step forward, five steps back sort of thing.”

In March, Gingrich became one of the first Republicans with national stature to endorse and embrace anti-tax Tea Parties. Gingrich’s 527 American Solutions for Winning the Future became a co-sponsor of the events, and Gingrich himself spoke at one of the largest April 15 events, a rally in New York City.

“I don’t think he ever was a viable 2012 candidate,” remarked Brett Joshpe, one of the other speakers at the New York rally. With the Scozzafava endorsement, “he certainly didn’t endear himself to his ‘base.’”

Eric Odom, a national Tea Party organizer who famously denied RNC Chairman Michael Steele a speaking slot at the April 15 Tea Party in Chicago, told TWI that he’d been “somewhat glad” when Gingrich endorsed the effort, and he’d added the “American Solutions” button to the official website. The Scozzafava had changed everything.

“On April 15, 2010, he would be one of the last people I’d ask for support,” said Odom. “I would not give him microphone time. I wouldn’t even welcome his endorsement or put his button on our website. If he runs for president, he would be in a position similar to where Dede [Scozzafava] is right now.”

Michael Patrick Leahy, a Tea Party activist who has transformed his TCOT Report website into a hub for Hoffman news, was just as harsh in his assessment. “In one ill informed decision, he has destroyed all the political capital he built up among the grassroots through his early public support for the Tax Day Tea Party,” said Leahy. “Every single person I’ve talked to in the Tea Party Movement is strongly supporting Doug Hoffman and simply can’t comprehend the former Speaker’s reasoning. His chances of securing support for a 2012 Presidential bid from the Tea Party Movement have turned to dust.”

Not all of the conservative activists reached by TWI were gloomy about Gingrich’s long-term prospects. Some suggested that the impact of the NY-23 election could fade as the 2010 midterms approached, and that if Hoffman pulled off a historic upset, all would be forgiven. But all admitted that Gingrich would find it harder to cast himself as a path-breaking conservative, bigger than his party.

“The fact of the matter is — and I happen to like Newt personally — he’s a Republican gladiator, not a conservative,” said David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union. “He’s done a lot of good for conservatives. His ideas tend to be conservative. But Newt’s a Republican first.”

Miller, back at home and watching her video of Gingrich answering her question appear on national news, was still disappointed in Gingrich’s response. The book he was promoting was a novel, about the bravery of George Washington and the men who won the Revolutionary War. She was mystified that Gingrich couldn’t see a historic battle when it broke out right in front of him.

“I’ve actually trained and gone to some of his functions for American Solutions,” said Miller. “But there’s a point where ‘pragmatism’ can erode our freedoms.”

We the undersigned believe that the National Republican Senatorial Committee should be committed to serving ALL the members of the Republican Party.

Additionally, the NRSC should be focused on defeating Democrats, not Republicans. Towards that end, we believe it was completely inappropriate for the NRSC to endorse a candidate in the Florida primary race.

Therefore, we request that both you and the NRSC alter your position on the Florida Senate race, maintain neutrality, and promise to spend no money directly or indirectly in that race.

Among the signatories: Tea Party leader Eric Odom, controversial “anti-jihadist” blogger Pamela Geller, frequent Blogginghead and TV pundit Matt Lewis, and RedState’s Erick Erickson, who has been blistering in his criticism of Republican moderates.

I very much appreciate the fact that Chairman Steele is now finally starting to reach out to the true grassroots side of the free-market movement in America. Unfortunately, it appears that he has only just decided to reach out after realizing how big the movement has gotten and how much media is now involved.

That said, we’re still excited to know that Chairman Steele will be in Chicago and we hope, after knowing that he’ll be in the city, that he’ll stop by and mingle with the Americans who will be rallying on April 15th. This will also present a fantastic time for Chairman Steele to LISTEN to what we have to say and perhaps gather some thoughts on what the RNC needs to be doing moving forward.

With regards to stage time, we respectfully must inform Chairman Steele that RNC officials are welcome to participate in the rally itself, but we prefer to limit stage time to those who are not elected officials, both in Government as well as political parties. This is an opportunity for Americans to speak, and elected officials to listen, not the other way around.

That’s pretty harsh, though Odom’s followers on Twitter seem to like the move. In the Tea Party cosmos, Rick Santelli > Alan Keyes > anybody else > Michael Steele.

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