Wasted Opportunity

Who Pulled the Plug on the Conservative Revival ?

An Analysis by Scott Rohter, June 2012

Republicans never had a better chance to put a solid conservative onto the ballot and into the White House than we did in this year’s Republican Primary Elections. We had all of the pent up energy from the TEA Party Movement that has been building for the last three and a half years. There were also the thousands of local 912 groups that have sprung up all across America since the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Not since the peanut farmer from Plains Georgia, Jimmy Carter, has there been such a firestorm of discontent raging in America. And not since the Presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan has there been such a level of excitement and enthusiasm re-invigorating the Republican Party … and all for what? Mitt Romney?

In spite of all of the good intentions, in spite of all the best laid plans of mice and men, the best that the TEA Party Movement could produce was a rather limp fisted moderate by the name of Mitt Romney. When the oath of office is finally administered to him on January 2, 2013 and I can assure you that it will be, he will repeat after Chief Justice John Roberts the following thirty-seven fateful words, “I Willard Romney do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” He should probably add four more little words to his oath, but he probably won’t. Those words are “so help me God”. He is going to need God’s help if he is ever going to fix what is wrong with our country.

How did the TEA Party Movement become so badly derailed? How did we get so far off the track? Just as four rotten years of Jimmy Carter produced the resurgence that led to Ronald Reagan, I would have guessed that these last four abominable years of Barack Obama would have resulted in something far better than Willard Romney. So why didn’t it? Who pulled the plug on the Conservative revival in America? Who threw the switch that shunted the TEA Party Train onto another track? How did conservatives ever allow ourselves to get so sidetracked?

In the early days of the TEA Party Movement there was just pure, raw, unbridled energy in opposition to President Obama’s progressive agenda. At some of these initial rallies there were organizers and organizations whose job it was to try to harness all of that energy and enthusiasm, and try to focus it in a particular direction. The trouble was, that it was a direction of their own choosing, not necessarily ours. These national groups received a lot of their funding and their direction, not from the typical discontented members of the TEA Party, but from a different group of disenchanted opponents of President Obama’s agenda.

These national organizations quietly and efficiently went about gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures and eventually millions of signatures, and they provided the logistical and technical help to the growing TEA Party Movement, along with recognized leaders who would soon be doing more than just infiltrating and providing support to the Movement. They would soon be directing the charge. This transition was seamless and it went almost unnoticed. The trouble with this was that the goals of these national organizations were not always the same as those of the average disgruntled TEA Party goers. The direction that they were taking us was not always in sync with where we wanted to go. The agenda and the direction of the TEA Party Movement were no longer being set at the grass roots level, by a majority of disenfranchised patriots. The operational planning of the agenda moved from the streets to the executive boardrooms, and it became perfectly obvious that it was being directed from above by a rather limited subset of very wealthy individuals. It is doubtful that the energetic masses of alienated conservative voters who attended the TEA Party rallies and these exceptionally wealthy individuals that are behind the national organizations would agree about very many things, including the focus of the whole movement, and about specific Republican candidates in particular. That soon became painfully obvious.

Michele Bachmann was the original TEA Party candidate and the obvious and deserving choice. However it was soon clear that one national organization preferred Hermann Cain, and another preferred Ron Paul. Soon Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry threw their hats into the ring too, and they had a different group of supporters and followers who were all claiming that their guy was the real TEA Party candidate. And finally there was Rick Santorum, who was never really the TEA Party candidate of first choice, but who only became so after all of the other so called conservative candidates had either shot themselves in the foot, or spent their entire political wads battling one another and cancelling each other out. That’s what actually happened…

To read the rest of this article and to view all the photographs that accompany the article please visit my website  http://www.lessgovisthebestgov.com/Republicans-progressives-Romney-TEA-Party-agenda.html

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