Sam Adams Alliance

January 23, 2012
They Toot
For Newt

By Alan Pell Crawford

That 100 Tea Party activists have come together to endorse Newt Gingrich for the Republican presidential nomination is good news for Gingrich, who won the South Carolina primary and might well win in Florida.

But this endorsement does not necessarily portend well  for other tea partiers. This assessment, mind you, has little to do with Gingrich himself, his opinions or his character. It has a lot to do, however, with the building of a political insurgency, which, after all, is what tea partiers say they want to achieve.

A few weeks ago, in a New York Magazine report on the Occupy Wall Street protestors, John Heilemann warned against writing them off just because cold weather has driven them back inside.

They might not be visible now, but they are plotting a return come spring. Plotting is indoor work, and what Heilemann calls “a cadre of prime movers—strategists, tacticians, and logicians; media gurus, technologists, and grand theorists” have been quietly getting the job done. That’s because they are “united by a single purpose: turning OWS from a brief shining moment into a bona fide movement.”

What the Occupiers have refused to do, it seems, is dissipate their energies in presidential politics. This might come as a surprise, but the occupiers are no less disillusioned with President Obama than the Republicans are angry at him. For that reason, the Occupiers are pretty much writing off the coming campaign and working toward a grander goal: changing the political culture.

Tea partiers, by contrast, seem to have spent months tearing their hair over which Republican to endorse. And, beyond a string of humiliating disappointments and a good deal of animosity engendered in their own ranks, they have little to show for their efforts.

The Anti-Romney

“I don’t know a single Tea Party person who does not despise Mitt Romney to the very core of their being,” one South Carolina tea partier told Matt Bai of the New York Times Magazine, for his recent piece on the movement’s “not-so-civil war.”

But in their frantic search for an anti-Romney—understandable as that might be—they might have done themselves a disservice. “After months of confusion and bickering over whom to support,” Bai reports, “a kind of unraveling has occurred at the upper reaches of the movement, in some cases causing friendships to fray and giving rise to charges and countercharges on Facebook. Officers have resigned. Angry statements have been issued. Reputations have been damaged.”

And they seem no nearer, really, to settling on a candidate than they were weeks ago.

There’s a moral to this story, maybe several. One is that presidential politics will always prove disappointing, and it should be approached with a healthy measure of skepticism.

Another is that an undue investment in it detracts from more important efforts, like working amicably together for more permanent gains. These are hard lessons, of course, but every successful movement has to learn them.

It’s called growing pains.

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