Not even the epic fail of former Tea Party Express chairman/spokesman Mark Williams can slow the tea party movement on it’s path to world domination. At least that’s what tea partiers tell me.
As we reach the one-week anniversary of Williams’ resignation from the TPE after a racist blog post he wrote caused a firestorm both inside the tea party movement and out, movement leaders say they’ve shaken off Williams and moved on — if they’ll talk about him at all.
“Isn’t it weird how these things turn out?” said Shelby Blakely, a member of the Tea Party Patriots National Leadership Council and executive director of the group’s online publication, the New Patriot Journal. Blakely said that, ironically, Williams has helped the tea party movement by leading to the public shaming of the TPE, which the Tea Party Patriots have long viewed as an impostor to the cause.
Blakely said that since Williams ran afoul of the NAACP and was torched on national airwaves, membership in the Tea Party Patriots has actually gone up, a boost she attributed to conservatives moving away from the TPE and looking for the “real thing” when it comes to tea party groups. TPP is made up of grassroots tea party gatherings across the county, while TPE is a creation of a group of Republican consultants.
Still, that distinction is one made only among tea partiers — the national media and outsiders to the movement rarely mention the difference between tea party groups, and Williams was generally portrayed as a tea party leader during the height of the controversy. I asked if Williams’ public association with the movement has hurt tea partiers.
“Overall, I think no,” Blakely said. “His attachment to the Tea Party Express was fortunate, because it exposed the inside of the group and how it operates.”
The long term effect, Blakely said, will be that the TPE will remain ostracized from the rest of the movement thanks to Williams. And, in the end she said that’s nothing but a good thing for the growth of the grassroots movement.
For the record, Blakely insisted that the TPP polices racism in its ranks and she told me the group has expelled members before for talk the national leadership council deemed to be hate speech. “At the Tea Party Patriots, if we find racism it’s excised,” she told me.
Ironically, the Tea Party Federation — the group of tea partiers that first turned on Williams when it booted him and the TPE from its ranks — doesn’t want to talk about the state of the movement now that Williams is, officially at least, gone from its leadership. A spokesperson for the TPF told me the group had no official comment and was ready to move on “look ahead.”
As for the TPE itself, its leaders have completely moved on from Williams. This week, the group made its first political endorsement since Williams left and says it’s trucking along as before. The group said that rumors of its demise — spread by the TPP following the Williams disaster — are greatly exaggerated.
“The Tea Party Express agenda is to get as many constitutional conservatives elected to office in November 2010 and 2012,” Amy Kremer, TPP chair, told me. “The time has come to put down the protest signs and pickup the campaign signs.”
