“The moment a mere numerical superiority by either states or voters in this country proceeds to ignore the needs and desires of the minority, and for their own selfish purpose or advancement, hamper or oppress that minority, or debar them in any way from equal privileges and equal rights -- that moment will mark the failure of our constitutional system.”
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.
Is she a serious political force or simply being provocative to sell books and speeches at $100,000 a pop?
Sarah Palin was the undisputed star at the recent Tea Party convention - a high wattage performance that left her fans salivating for a 2012 Presidential run and her enemies chuckling at her hand notes and over-the-top rhetoric.
But what does Sarah really want?
Is she a serious contender for leadership within the Republican Party, putative leader of a third party or a great opportunist that has leveraged her 2008 failed run for the Vice Presidency into an uber lucrative television, print and public speaking empire?
Of course, only Sarah and Todd Palin (better known as the "First Dude") really know.
But in a recent interview with FoxNews' Sean Hannity, Palin seemed to make a play for simultaneous Tea Party leader and serious Republican contender.
In the most striking moment of the interview, Palin suggests that the Tea Party "takeover" the Republican Party.
"I vote to takeover the Republican Party, Tea Partiers, and get them [Republicans] to see the light," Palin said.
While many mainstream Republicans are thrilled by the idea that they will be able to harness the enthusiasm of the Tea Party for an electoral takeover of the country in 2010 and 2012, there is also anxiety that it could all blow up in their face.
Whatever Palin's true intentions, she is a force to be reckoned with - a force that is unpredictable and could very well impact both mainstream parties' electoral fortunes in surprising ways.
Palin has recently maneuvered herself into the role of unofficial leader of the movement, speaking to the first-ever National Tea Party Convention in Nashville last month and championing the tea parties in media interviews.
Palin was paid $100,000 for her speech to the tea party convention. The former governor said the payment was donated back into the political movement, but she has yet to explain how or to whom the money was given.
Asked to define the tea party movement, Palin said "it's pretty simple. it's a smaller, smarter government, not growing government to control more of our lives and our businesses and make decisions for us."
"It really is not as complicated as some in Washington, D.C. want to make it out to be," she claimed.
From her new perch as a FoxNews analyst, Palin calls for the "takeover" of the GOP:
Some Republican strategists say she appears to be trying to become, at minimum, a leader of the tea party movement and a power broker within the GOP.
But she has done little to reassure centrists that she is presidential material. As a celebrity politician, Palin can draw enormous crowds and presumably could raise lots of money from conservative donors for a presidential campaign if she decided to run. But her fortunes have declined with the general electorate. Seventy-one percent of Americans don't consider Palin qualified to be president, and 55 percent have an unfavorable view of her, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll.
"Sarah Palin is a performer," says a prominent Republican who has advised two presidents. "She has star quality, but she's content free. Her audience consists of the 25 to 35 percent [of Americans] who are totally disaffected, totally disenchanted." Palin defenders, however, say that she has much more potential than her critics think and that she realizes she needs to learn more about issues.
The inspiration for the Tea Party is clear: Barack Obama.
But its leader increasingly looks like Sarah Palin.
The President represents the first real strategic threat to the Reagan coalition. While many Republican strategist have warned the GOP of a demographic shift in the country, the idea of a changing electorate only became real, visible and three-dimensional with the election of Barack Obama.
His tenure in the White House is testimony to the evolving demographic trends in the United States.
The "blue collar" Reagan Democrats and traditional Republicans are, demographically speaking, heading into the sunset, being replaced in the electorate by young "ethnics" and the digital generation of urban, educated whites who have tended to be Independents, but generally prefer the Democrats and Progressive positions on issues like public education reform, the environment and even gay marriage.
These shifts have given the GOP a medium and long term problem: its Reagan-era voters are dying out faster than the GOP message is evolving to attract the changing face of America.
Ironically, the Republican Party was itself born from the remnants of another party, the Whig Party.
As the Whigs lost support of the people, and some of its more radical leaders, for in part taking an ambiguous position on abolishing slavery, the radicals in the Whig Party, people such as Abraham Lincoln, joined forces with like-minded Whigs the create the Republican Party with a clear anti-slavery philosophy at its core.
It is not that surprising, therefore, that the rump of the Reagan coalition is organizing for one last hurrah: through the Tea Party.
Republicans hope this movement will effectively result in a higher Republican vote in November, 2010. There is the hope of continuing the Scott Brown Massachusetts upset victory with a rolling wave that could topple the Democratic majorities in one and possibly, dream of dreams, both houses of Congress.
It is not surprising that Tancredo pronounced in his speech the beginning of a "counter-revolution".
And Sarah Palin, the darling of the right, the hope of the Tea Party movement, embodies this last gasp of the Reaganites.
Palin is an outsider to Washington and the ossified, retro-thinking Republican leadership in Congress. (Think, Reagan from Alaska.)
She is "genuine" even as all other politicians seem programmed by PR people into bland, packaged talking points machines. (Think, Reagan quips and charming delivery of a speech.)
And she does not actually pretend knowing anything - she is, like many people in the movement, angry and ready to talk action with no pretense of intellectual rigor or policy knowledge. (Actually, Reagan was quite bright, a brilliant communicator and had tremendous integrity.)
Anger is her vessel and an angry Tea Party her natural home. That is also where the Reagan connection breaks.
Reagan, whether you agreed or not with his policy decisions, almost always appealed to an optimistic sense of America. He never promoted hate or division in a cheap attempt to manipulate angry voters to support his position.
Tellingly, Palin pronounced that "America is ready for another Revolution". She may be right. But what kind of revolution remains to be seen.
Perhaps more obvious is the natural leader of the Tea Party Revolution: Sarah Palin, of course.
As keynote speaker at the convention, Palin has undoubtedly given the tea party movement a new level of legitimacy and stature. Moreover, her decision to go ahead with the speech even as others pulled out suggested to many that she may be positioning herself as the de facto leader of the tea party movement.
Bolstering that view is Palin’s decision to turn down an invitation to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference later this month. The conference is widely considered a must-attend event for conservatives and Republicans lining up a run for office.
But associating herself so strongly with the tea party movement – she’s planning to headline tea party events in Searchlight, Nev., and Boston in the near future – could hurt Palin, too. For one, it could turn off independent and moderate voters, many of whom make up the 46 percent of Americans who view her unfavorably, according to a recent CNN poll.
Part of what makes the tea party movement controversial are the fringe views held by some activists. Former congressman Tom Tancredo stirred up controversy with his opening night speech Thursday when he said Mr. Obama was elected by "people who could not even spell the word vote or say it in English," and called for making civics literacy tests a prerequisite for voting. Such tests were used during Jim Crow to keep blacks from voting and were banned by the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Mr. Tancredo later said he wasn’t targeting any particular group with his remark.
Tea party convention organizer Judson Phillips called Tancredo’s speech “fantastic.”
Some tea party activists, such as Lee Puckett, a commercial photographer from Birmingham, Ala., say they’re not sure Palin is smart to court the tea party because it could make her seem too far out of the mainstream.
Even if the tea party movement turns out not to be her natural constituency – if the fringe elements tarnish her broader appeal or the movement simply rejects the notion of a leader – Palin is for now its chief cheerleader.
This was the Palin we saw at the 2008 Republican convention, the snarling pitbull in shimmery lipstick. I know journalists aren't supposed to use words like mean and dumb, but I can't help it. Palin is one of the meanest people on the public stage today. She wallows in it. She loves it! Also? Possibly one of the dumbest. But mean works, and so does dumb. And so do lies, and there were many mean, dumb lies in her speech.
How rich that she read her talk in a sing-song voice as she ripped Barack Obama for using a Teleprompter. Once she left the speech for the Q&A, she really went off-message, as well as nearly off-English. (Even though it looked like, at one point, she was reading answers off of her hand.) "They're not knowin what are we gonna do if we don't have Tea Party support" was one of my favorite head-scratchers, a great echo of "when Putin rears his head."
But it was also in her brief Q&A that she made one comment she might regret, if anyone in the Republican Party ever held her accountable. She told the crowd her husband Todd -- according to recently released emails, the non-elected former governor of Alaska -- is "much too independent" to be a Republican, because he's even "more conservative" than she is. What a great way to revisit the controversy over Todd's membership in the secessionist Alaska Independent Party! Remember how Palin dogged poor McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt, trying to get him to denounce Salon's reporting on the Palins and AIP? She tried to get Schmidt to lie and say her husband checked the AIP box on voter forms mistakenly, and he refused. Now she's bragging her husband isn't a Republican because he's so "independent."
She lied about rejecting stimulus money for Alaska (apparently she rejected a small home-weatherization project, which as it is sounds kind of mean for the governor of Alaska.) She lied about Obama's position on terrorism and the Christmas Day would-be bomber. She mixed up Alaska and America at least once. It was hilarious to hear her denounce political "talk, talk, talk" and also brag about the job she did as governor, when in fact she quit that job to talk, talk, talk, for money, at wine shows and for-profit tea parties and of course for Fox News.
I have to say, I've been assuming Palin probably won't run for president, and that she quit her job as Alaska governor to cash in on her fame. I now feel pretty certain she's trying to do both. She's certainly looking like a grifter, and cashing in at the for-profit Tea Party Nation event, and taking questions from the increasingly despised Phillips, may hurt her politically. But it's now pretty clear to me that in all her narcissism, she thinks she can get rich and run for president at the same time. And who am I to say she can't, given the delusions of her right-wing supporters?
On FoxNews Palin both denies being the leader, but also speaks the Tea Party line as would its leader:
Will the latest political phenomenon become a society-changing movement influencing elections and beyond?
''We are people who understand something wrong is going on in this country, and we want to change it,'' says Dan Garner, a married 40-year-old sales representative from nearby Carthage who is new to politics. Like so many others, he's had enough. ''The core thing is a loss of individual liberty.''
Retirees, stay-at-home moms, small-business owners, corporate executives and everyone in between -- many political neophytes who aren't hardcore ideologues -- are using the latest technology to come together and vent their frustrations about their country and plot to install a new group in charge of the government.
They formed a loose network of grass-roots groups to speak out against President Barack Obama and the Democratic-controlled Congress. They held their first national ''tea party'' convention over the weekend. And they're already having some impact on American politics.
The big unknown is whether their power is truly transformative.
What's more certain is, well, the uncertainty.
No one is quite sure what to make of this leaderless morass of people, born not even a year ago in communities from coast to coast.
But everyone seems to want a piece of it.
Republicans are trying to co-opt it. Democrats are trying to marginalize it. And people with personal aspirations -- whether financial or political -- are trying to take advantage of it.
''America is ready for another revolution, and you are a part of this,'' Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee, told convention attendees Saturday. ''You all have the courage to stand up and speak out.''
Many ''tea party'' disciples view the former Alaska governor -- also an author, a Fox News analyst and a potential 2012 presidential candidate -- as their de facto leader. But she repeatedly dismissed that notion, saying: ''The 'tea party' movement is not a top-down operation. It's a ground-up call to action that is forcing both parties to change the way they're doing business, and that's beautiful.''
In many ways, the coalition -- decidedly conservative and libertarian but otherwise diverse -- should have been expected to emerge as power shifted in Washington. This country has a long history of citizens rising up against people in power, particularly in tough times like recession.
From NBC's Meet the Press a debate on the impact of the Tea Party on the 2010 elections:
Sarah Palin said she would consider a run for president in 2012 “if I believe that that is the right thing to do for our country and for the Palin family,” according to a television interview broadcast Sunday morning.
“It would be absurd to not consider what it is that I can potentially do to help our country,” she told host Chris Wallace on the news program “Fox News Sunday” in an interview conducted a few hours before her Saturday night address at the inaugural National Tea Party Convention in Nashville. “I won’t close the door that perhaps could be open for me in the future.”
Those words were buttressed by the response she received inside the convention Saturday night. As Ms. Palin left the convention stage, the crowd erupted into chants of “Run, Sarah, Run.”
Ms. Palin gave the Tea Party crowd exactly what they wanted to hear on Saturday, declaring the primacy of the Tenth Amendment in limiting government powers, complaining about the bailouts and the “generational theft” of rising deficits, and urging the audience to back conservative challengers in contested primaries.
“America is ready for another revolution!” she told the crowd, prompting the first of several standing ovations.
ABC News' This Week also debates what the Tea Party really means for both the Democrats and the Republicans:
...But in a way, we are at war with Mexico, in a way.
I'll say it in this way: Mexico is aiding and abetting an invasion of this country. They are part of the problem. They are doing what they are — in fact, they are creating situations along that border using their own military to protect drug trafficking into the United States, pushing their own people into the United States for a variety of reasons. It is an invasion. It is an act of aggression...
...Years since then Tom has carried the torch. Doing whatever it takes to protect our borders, the language of our country's founders and to save our shared American culture. His championing of these tenets has gained him supporters who believe in his ideals.
Now Tancredo is on the front lines of the Tea Party as it challenges the mainstream GOP and organizes itself to raise money to elect candidates across the country.
His speech, which opened the first ever Tea Party Convention in Nashville, was a call to return to the good old times - the days when only white people could vote in the United States.
...Tancredo, a former presidential candidate known for his opposition to illegal immigration, drew the battle lines between the tea party movement and the leadership in Washington in his opening speech.
"People who could not spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House -- name is Barack Hussein Obama," he said. "The revolution has come. It was led by the cult of multiculturalism aided by leftist liberals all over who don't have the same ideas about America as we do."
Arguing that American "culture," one based on "Judeo-Christian principles," is under attack, Tancredo said the tea party movement would be non-existent if Obama hadn't won the election and pushed the country swiftly to the left...
Former congressman Tom Tancredo took heat Friday for remarks at the national Tea Party convention that critics viewed as calling for a return to Jim Crow laws.
But Tancredo said he wasn't targeting a specific group when he suggested in Nashville there should be a "civics-literacy" test before someone could vote.
"People who could not even spell the word 'vote' or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House," Tancredo said in his opening-day speech Thursday.
"His name is Barack Hussein Obama."
Tests were used to prevent blacks from voting during segregation and were banned by the Voting Rights Act in 1964.
Friday, February 26, 2010 at 9:12AM 
Is she a serious political force or simply being provocative to sell books and speeches at $100,000 a pop?
