Tea Party Newcomers Not Expecting Much From Obama After SOTU

Rep. Allen West (R-FL)
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President Obama spent a little more than an hour last night trying to reach out to the new divided Congress in a State Of The Union that was long on centrism and, seemingly, short on division. But it’s not clear Obama made the connection he was hoping to. Two high-profile members of the tea party freshman class on Capitol Hill told TPM after the speech that, while they appreciated the shift in rhetoric, they don’t expect much to come from Obama’s efforts to reach out to the right.

[TPM SLIDESHOW: ‘Win The Future’: President Obama’s State Of The Union]

“Well, we’ll see. We’ll see,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) said when I asked him if Obama had heard the message delivered by the voters in November. “Happy to hear him enforcing an earmark ban. Happy to hear about the possibility of simplifying the tax code and reducing the corporate tax rate. I was a little bit troubled and perplexed by what he means when he says all that and yet talks about new investment, investment, investment.”

Lee is a posterboy for the conservative purity movement in the current GOP. He ascended to the Senate after tea partiers in Utah pushed Sen. Bob Bennett (R) off the ballot at the state Republican convention. Now he’s among the more hardcore tea party supporters on the Hill and one of the new type of Republican Obama is going to have to work with as things move ahead.

And he didn’t sound too thrilled by all that “investment” talk in Obama’s address.

“Sounds to me like more government spending,” Lee said. “Seems somewhat contradictory to the idea of cutting government spending and not heaping more debt on the backs of unborn generations of Americans.”

Rep. Allen West (R-FL) had a similar take. West, the lone tea party African American on the Hill and a staunch conservative, found things to like in the SOTU — but he’s not holding his breath waiting for the words to turn into bipartisan action.

“The theme has to be a president that was stuck between two worlds, trying to show he learned the lesson of November 2 and sounding more like a conservative but still trying to interject those points to appease his base,” he told TPM. “Now is the proof in the pudding. We’ll see what happens.”

Like Lee, West reflexively recoiled from the investments in high-speed rail, high-speed internet, education, energy and other things Obama mentioned in his speech.

“If the investment talk is a connotation for government spending and stimulus spending, because it sounds like shovel-ready jobs again, no. It’s not going to happen,” West said.

Still, there were things in the speech that gave West hope. But not much.

“At least he did say he’s looking to freeze spending for five years and that’s a start,” West said. “We’ll see if he’s willing to work with us on that.”

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