Jake Tapper notes that in an interview in Jon Alter’s new book The Promise President Obama refers to Tea Partiers as “tea baggers”. I actually heard the president use the same phrase once, and was a little surprised myself.
Tapper writes “Tea Party activists loath the term ‘tea baggers,’ which has emerged in liberal media outlets and elsewhere as a method of mocking the activists and their concerns.”
But this isn’t true, though a number of conservative pressure groups have tried to claim as much. The phrase “tea bagger” was originally a coinage of the Tea Party folks themselves. Their opponents picked it up from them after they chose it and continued using it after the right-wing activists ditched it in favor of “Tea Partier” since ‘tea bagger’ can be taken as a reference to a particular sexual practice.
