The Tea Party is going to have a major impact on this election, but not in the way people expect.  Neither of the political parties understands the Tea Party movement.  Neither does anyone in the main stream media.  They are confused because the Tea Party is not a political party and it doesn’t have any official leaders.  No single organization really represents the Tea Party.  The Tea Party is a movement, not an organization.  This is something that hasn’t been seen in this country for a long time.  There is now huge network of people not overly concerned about any political party or any particular politician.  They are motivated by a set of principles and ideas that transcend all of the above.  These principles are simple, but very powerful.  One is the belief in a smaller, less intrusive government.  Another is a conviction that the Constitution really matters and our elected officials have a duty to be restrained by it.  Finally, they believe that government is spending too much money and wasting it.

Thanks to modern technology, the Tea Party has miraculously morphed into a powerful nationwide movement totally independent of any organization or politician.  Yet it is still capable of having a major impact on elections.  This started with some loosely organized demonstrations in 2010, primarily intended to protest high taxes.  That is how the name developed.  The modern Tea Party is motivated by the same things that motivated the original Tea Party.  But this didn’t follow the traditional pattern of political movements.  This is not another arm of the Republican Party, as naively believed by many in the main stream media.  It also isn’t a new political party.  There is no Tea Party “Party.”  That is why RINO Republicans were defeated in primary elections.  The replacements are still Republicans, but they are Republicans who know that failure to be guided by the core principles described above will result in a very short political career.   It may surprise Democrats to learn that Tea Party members would welcome them too.  But as of now the Tea Party is all too aware of one simple reality.  While the Republican Party is not necessarily its friend, the Democratic Party is for most purposes, its enemy.  The important thing to remember is that the Tea Party believes that politicians work for us, not vice versa.  It is far less worried about what politicians say and more concerned with what they do.

I would probably describe the Tea Party as this vast conservative cloud.  Information moves within the cloud at the speed of light, but it is guided by the power of the message, not the popularity of the messenger.  The result is astonishing to watch.  During the primary elections last spring, some RINO Republicans learned about the power of the Tea Party the hard way.  Candidates with strong support from the Republican establishment found themselves losing in primary elections to relative newcomers.  But the real strength of the Tea Party started to show up in local elections with national impact.  The best example was the recall election against Governor Scot Walker.  Several organizations developed hard hitting ads supporting Scot Walker and then funded them by appealing to the vast Tea Party cloud.  The results were shocking.  Suddenly political ads were not generated by professional staff wearing green eye shades in cigar filled rooms, but rather by political entrepreneurs.  It is really simple.  If you build it, they will fund.  If you deliver a top quality hard-hitting ad, you will find plenty of people willing to donate to your cause.  If you develop a mediocre ad you will get very little funding.  It is like an American Idol contest for campaign ads.  In a way, the Tea Party has become the perfect political test market.

What is about to happen is that there are going to be some very power ads floated out there on the Tea Party cloud.  Effective ads, promoted by people who can deliver results, will generate massive amounts of funding overnight.  Some of these ads will go where angels and Republican fear to tread.  There are a lot of people out there who think that Barack Obama is a threat to the very existence of our democracy.  They are terrified that Republicans will bungle this and lose to possibly the worst President in U.S. history because of their own incompetence.  They believe that many people voted for Barack Obama in 2008 because they did not know the truth about his personal history.  They are determined to prevent this from happening again.  There are literally millions of people across this country primed to pull a Peter Boyle.  They are mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore.  If Mitt Romney is unwilling or unable to explain the problem, they will explain the problem.   A lot of them are less than enthusiastic about Mitt Romney, but they are off the charts in their determination to get rid of Obama.  Ultimately they will show up in droves to vote him out of office.  But they will do more than that.  This grass roots network is going to result in some of the most devastating political ads in our nation’s history.

The liberal media naively thinks they are the only ones who can decide what matters in this election season.  That is why they view Mitt Romney’s statement about the Libya crisis as a major blunder while ignoring the real story of a failed foreign policy and gross negligence in protecting our Ambassador.  It is why they think that Mitt Romney pointing out, correctly,  that nearly half the people in the U.S. “are” living off the taxes paid by the other half is a political blunder.  They really think they that they alone will decide what matters in this election.  That was never totally true, but the main stream media has had a major role in prior elections.  But things have changed since 2008.  The big boys like CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and even Fox News aren’t so big anymore.  They still talk, but far fewer people listen.  The audience tuned into that Tea Party cloud is far larger than all of them combined.

The Tea Party movement is a storm cloud for Democrats and anyone else who supports Barack Obama.  I believe this cloud will generate hurricane force winds that will blow the Democratic establishment right out of office.  But be advised.  Although this storm is currently favoring Republicans, for the reasons stated above, ultimately, it is a bi-partisan cloud.  If Republicans don’t start listening, and more importantly, start acting, the next storm will be directed at them.

TDM