Tea Partying, Florida-Style
The Tea Party movement is alive, well, and still confounding the powers that be.
It is something of an ironic accident that the Tea Party Express tour’s final stop was here in Orlando. Florida has become the Alamogordo Test Range for the Tea Party movement’s mushrooming power, and this state’s Republican establishment may soon feel the thermonuclear blast. As The American Spectator’s Tampa-based Larry Thornberry reports today, Florida GOP chairman Jim Greer and Gov. Charlie Crist have found themselves in the crosshairs of reinvigorated populist sentiment.
The grassroots energy that has made Crist’s Senate primary challenger Marco Rubio a hero to conservatives resembles one of the tropical storms that so frequently strike the Florida coast: powerful, unpredictable and capable of inflicting cataclysmic damage wherever it makes landfall.
Florida is going to be another very interesting test case for the power of the conservative grassroots. If Rubio can beat the better-funded, GOP-backed Crist, it will prove that a conservative populist movement can create enough mass to pull moderates into its orbit. And if it can happen in Florida, it can happen anywhere else. That should get the attention of both parties in a way the most recent elections to this point have not.
The GOP, or at least vulnerable members thereof, may be hearing the distant sound of tea party thunder already. Mark Kirk, who voted to jack up your energy prices and kill yet more jobs in the service of a fantasy, is one of the people leading the charge to kill government-run health care.
Now, his health care stance may be coincidental. It may be that he’s tacking to the right for his Senate race. On the other hand, who can deny that there is a force pulling him in that direction?
At any rate, check out Stacy’s other reports from Orlando. He has been down there all week, living the hard life of a deprived blogger and filing solid stories.
One last tidbit, though, is worth some attention.
The Tea Party movement has drawn into politics people who have seldom been part of the process before. At last night’s Lake Eola Park event, a woman in blue jeans distributed orange flyers advertising a “Freedom Rally” scheduled for February’s annual Bike Week in Daytona Beach. When hell-raisers on Harleys come roaring into the national debate, who can predict the outcome?
Harleys, Daytona in February, and a Tea Party Rally? Yeah, there’s no chance in the world Stacy won’t be right in the middle of that.
And I dare some pencil-necked progressive twit to sow up at that rally waving a “teabagger” sign.
Other Posts of Interest:
- Washington is Closed Today. Sorry. (UPDATED: An Open Challenge to the Liar Alan Colmes)
- Chambliss’ Win and the Myriad of Lessons
- You Don’t Know Mike Duncan, But He Should Be Fired
Category: The Good Old US of A
