Author: David Weigel

His son Rand’s campaign for Senate in Kentucky is going better than anyone could have expected — every Kentuckian I met at the National Tea Party Convention backed him — but Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) is drawing three primary opponents for his own re-election bid. Ironically, all three are from the Tea Party movement, which, as reporter Tom Benning points out, would be hard to imagine without the energy stirred up by Paul’s 2008 presidential bid.

Tea Party associations aside, many of the challengers’ criticisms echo concerns of Paul’s past opponents: that he is too focused on his national ambitions; that his views are too extreme; that he doesn’t support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; that he votes “no” on everything, including federal aid for his district after Hurricane Ike.

“The word I keep hearing is ‘ineffective,’ ” said [challenger John] Gay, a school business administrator. “This district is not really being represented as it could be.”

The criticism is, to say the least, ironic. Almost nothing that Paul does cuts against the rhetoric of the Tea Party movement that is mentioned most in the press: responsible spending and adherence to the Constitution. But some of it does cut against the priorities of national security conservatives and partisan Republicans.

There is one thing Paul does that might backfire. While Paul votes against basically all spending bills, he notoriously gets earmark requests into those bills, so that local projects survive when other members vote those bills through. That barely dinged Paul in 2008, but it may become an issue now.

I’ve got some more interviews from Nashville and the National Tea Party Convention that didn’t make it into today’s story. Here is Roy Moore, the “Ten Commandments judge” who is making a second Republican bid for governor of Alabama this year, musing on a subject he’s had experience with: how talking about “revolution” and “tyranny” gets covered by the media.

From the stage of the National Tea Party Convention, Judson Phillips announced that organizers would be putting together a second convention from July 15 through July 17. (Worth noting: The convention program called it the “first” but not “first annual” event of its kind.) The main goals, said Phillips: more people and a “lower price point,” so that more activists could participate. That might calm some critics of this convention’s price, if not critics who have personal beef with Phillips.

The location for the event is up in the air, but Phillips and other organizers threw around Las Vegas or San Diego as the most likely locations, in part because of the lack of conservative events in the west.

Democrats have dodged a bullet in Illinois after Scott Lee Cohen, a pawnbroker who concealed a history of drug use and domestic violence until after he won the primary for lieutenant governor, dropped his bid. The Sun-Times story on his withdrawal — which happened at a Super Bowl party — paints a pretty good picture of the guy.

“None of my opponents called to congratulate me, not a senator, not a congressman, not one person called to congratulate me,” he said.

Asked if that hurt his feelings, Cohen said that lack of calls “showed me no respect. It absolutely hurt my feelings.”

You have to feel for Jason Kyle, whose image will now live forever as a proud endorser of a candidate who, in retrospect, practically oozed sleaze from every pore.

NASHVILLE — In the weeks leading up to the National Tea Party Convention, Judson Phillips didn’t do much talking to the media. The founder of Tea Party Nation, the chief organizer of the conference alongside his wife Shelley, was buffeted by attacks from Tea Party activists who accused him of staging a costly, “elite” convention, and dirtying the reputation of the movement by paying Sarah Palin $100,000 to speak there. On January 14, Tea Party Nation put out word that only five conservative media outlets would get full access to the convention. On January 30, they issued an email to their internal list pushing back against “baseless accusations and criticism” from angry Tea Party activists.

But on the floor of his convention, the paranoid, mysterious Judson Phillips was nowhere to be seen. The real Phillips, a jovial defense attorney, bounded in and out of sessions, across the stage of the Gaylord Opryland Hotel’s Tennessee Ballroom, and from interview to interview. Hardly 15 minutes could go by without Phillips, sporting a rumpled tan suit and day-old shave, shaking the hand of a grateful attendee or being miked for a new interview.

“I’m talking to them,” he said, pointing at a video crew from Time magazine, and asking if he could wait a few minutes to answer questions from TWI. “Then I’m talking to them.” He pointed to CNN’s set-up box in the corner of the small convention hall. “Then I have another interview in a half hour. But I will talk to you!”

As this three-day event wrapped up with an hourlong address by and Q&A with Sarah Palin — broadcast live on CNN, Fox, MSNBC and C-Span — it was clear that Phillips’s massive and controversial gamble had mostly paid off. More than 200 members of the media had descended on Nashville to write probing stories on the Tea Party Movement. In the end, said Phillips, the convention would turn a small profit — a step down from his initial hopes to make enough of a profit to launch a 527 that would back conservative candidates, but when compared to the rumors that led up to the convention, a smashing success.

“We’re going to break even, maybe a little bit into the black,” Phillips told TWI. And just as he did from the main stage, Phillips went a little further and ribbed his critics with a joke. “I’m not planning to declare bankruptcy. I had to do that one time–it really sucks when you have to do that.”

To the delight of attendees, the National Tea Party Convention became a coming-out party for a movement that’s always had an oppositional relationship to the press. It was a small event — around half the size of the inaugural YearlyKos convention of liberal bloggers in 2006 — and The Gaylord Opryland location served to make it look even smaller. The entire weekend was contained in a ballroom and three breakout rooms adjacent to a short lobby with media check-in on one end and a raft of cameras on the other, with pundits like The Daily Beast’s John Avlon and RedState’s Erick Erickson doing quick live bits. Getting to the convention floor meant walking through one of two indoor shopping malls, one of them inside a massive dome decked out with greenery and artificial lakes. “I imagined one day I’d meet [Palin],” said conservative media pioneer Andrew Breitbart in his introduction of the former governor. “I just never knew that it would be in the middle of Tennessee, in a biosphere. Or is it an international space station? Or is it the set of Avatar?”

Inside the main hall, and inside the breakout sessions, there was one member of the media for every three Tea Partiers. During the troubled run-up to the convention, those sessions (and Palin’s speech) were scheduled to be closed to the media, and only a few cloaked-in-mystery “availabilities” would be opened up.

“I think they were the dog that caught the car,” said Erickson, who had been an early critic of the convention. “They got Palin. Who thought they were going to get Palin? They didn’t know what to do next.”

In the final stretch, as coverage of the “intra-Tea Party infighting” reached fever pitch, Phillips put Memphis TEA Party founder Mark Skoda in charge of media outreach. (”I just didn’t want to deal with it,” Phillips told TWI.) It was Skoda, a bombastic radio host and consultant, who started keeping in touch and on top of media requests and letting the world in.

“I jumped in when all the negative press was coming,” Skoda told TWI, “because I don’t have a lot of tolerance for people who want to be bullies. My focus was getting as much video press in here as possible, that show that we’re not a bunch of crazies, OK? So there was a necessity to look at international press. We wanted to give them access because this is truly American. Our president may not believe in American exceptionalism, but I do. And if you look at most of the U.S. press, there’s a national audience — there’s a lot of videography going on. My sense was: Nobody here is wearing crazy outfits, there’s no little pointy hats, no screaming mimis, no signs.”

Skoda’s calculation paid off. The few people in “crazy outfits” did draw cameras toward them as if they were magnetized. One was William Temple, a pastor who donned the revolutionary war garb and British accent he’d broken out at every Tea Party. During speeches, Temple would wave his hat and lead cheers of “Hip, hip, huzzah!” Outside of the main room, he was interviewed with every step he took. But Tea Partiers hardly had anything to fear from the quotable and polite man who co-starred in “Tea Party: The Documentary Film” and led the 9/12 march on Washington.

“Gone were the placards that protesters carried [at Tea Parties] last year with Mr. Obama’s face wearing a Hitler mustache or superimposed on the Joker,” wrote Kate Zernike in a New York Times piece representative of the convention coverage. Many questions to organizers were about the firey speech by former congressman Tom Tancredo that opened the convention; many questions to attendees were about Palin, and whether they’d back her if she ran for president. The controversy surrounding the convention and its speakers led to media coverage of the convention as a mainstream political event, a stop along the road to the rebuilding of the GOP. One sign of how happy Tea Partiers were to see the media there came after Anthony Reese, who’d left the organizing committee of the convention in a huff, staged a press conference with three other angry activists critical of what happened–and then asked Fox’s Carl Cameron for a photo together. Cameron obliged.

“I think the media convinced the media to cover this by playing up the early stories,” said Glenn Reynolds, the libertarian Instapundit blogger who drove to the convention from his home in Knoxville. He was conducting interviews for PajamasTV, the conservative web network that ran some of the earliest coverage of the Tea Party movement, and was allowed to livestream most of this convention. “If I wanted to give Judson Phillips more credit than he deserves, I’d claim he was actually a genius who manipulated the media into giving this more coverage. I mean, this was the front-page, headline story in the Knoxville paper yesterday!”

High ticket prices aside, the Tea Partiers who made it to Nashville made up a representative — if slightly wealthier than average — cross-section of the movement. The overwhelming number of attendees were white, and when World Net Daily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah took a moment in his Friday night speech to ask how many of them were “born between 1946 and 1961,” the vast majority of hands shot up. On Friday night, Andrew Breitbart introduced “Generation Zero,” a splashy documentary that argues that the financial crisis was deliberately engineered by radical 1960s ideologues. Footage of dancing hippies and pictures of Saul Alinksy — the radical organizer who has become a household name among Tea Parties — were intercut with conservative writers like Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, historian Victor Davis Hanson, and Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald, explaining how left-wing theorists had long wanted to bring down capitalism and replace it with a socialist society. In a breakout session on immigration policy, Tancredo explained to Tea Partiers that Democrats wanted immigration reform in order to enfranchise millions of new voters to put them in perpetual power.

“Remember when Rahm Emanuel said ‘You never let a good crisis go to waste?’” said Lisa Mei Norton, a Tea Party activist and singer who opened the convention on Thursday night. “Now, what did he mean by that?”

Norton told TWI that her beef with the media stemmed from how reporters covered things “they think are bad” out of proportion to everything else. She didn’t sing it at the conference, but she’s recorded a song about Barack Obama’s citizenship called “Where Were You Born?” Yes, she had questions about Obama’s citizenship. It was perfectly fine for reporters to write about it when Tea Partiers questioned Obama’s birth certificate. The problem, she said, came when reporters didn’t put that in context.

“Why is it?” she asked. “Is it the media leans left, and wants to only highlight things that put conservatives in a bad light, and downplay negative things that happen on the left?”

For John Ball, a political consultant working for “Ten Commandments judge” Roy Moore — now a candidate for governor of Alabama — understanding how the media covered conservatism was one of the major goals of the convention. After TWI spoke to Moore, Ball asked for some analysis of exactly how and why the media turned conservative quotes into “extreme” gaffes.

“When we talk about the Constitution and getting back to the founders,” said Ball, “you guys are ready to say ‘Oh, the founders who owned slaves? Who wouldn’t let women vote? You want to get back to that?’ I think Tea Party people need to understand how that works.”

The threat of media bias, the way that the press could trip up inexperienced activists, was obvious enough to Amy Kremer. She had split with Tea Party Patriots — she’d been on the board — when she decided to join the Tea Party Express. Unlike Tea Party Patriots, which is run by grassroots activists, her new group is run by Republican consultants. It had been the focus of outsized media attention, more grist for the “Tea Party infighting” narrative. Kremer didn’t care. Neither, she said, did activists. “Nobody who comes to these rallies knows the difference between Tea Party Patriots and Tea Party Express.”

From her perspective, the coverage of the Tea Party Convention represented the media as it should work. The live network broadcast, she said, was “amazing.”

“You go the media when you have a message to get out,” said Kremer. “We’re our own media resource in this movement. But I think it’s good that they were here so the whole country could see what happened tonight.”

When the convention had ended and the cameras had packed up, TWI caught Phillips again, rubbing his eyes, summoning the energy to go out with his top volunteers to celebrate. He’d had no idea that the networks had indulged him by running so much of the conference and of Palin’s speech.

“I just assumed that as soon as she sat down, they all would jump out,” said Phillips. “I knew C-Span would stay. That’s C-Span’s thing. But wow! That’s incredible!”

NASHVILLE — “I’m so proud to be an American! Happy birthday, Ronald Reagan.”

Sarah Palin took the stage of the National Tea Party Convention to a thundering ovation, which she cut down quickly by praising “anyone who serves in uniform or has served in uniform” and diving right into her speech.

“I am a supporter of this movement. I believe in this movement,” said Palin. “America is ready for another revolution.”

Palin adroitly rewrote the history of the past three months of elections, giving the Tea Party movement credit for Scott Brown’s election in Massachusetts and calling the White House “0 for 3″ in recent elections — leaving out the New York special election where her candidate, the Conservative Party’s Doug Hoffman, lost in a last-minute upset.

“You know,” said Palin of Brown, “he was just a guy with a truck, and a passion to serve his country,” said Palin. Brown, however, was a state senator and state representative whose campaign staffers cut their teeth with Mitt Romney.

Nodding at the much-discussed question of whether this speech would make Palin the “leader” of the Tea Party movement, she said that the activists did not have a “king or queen.” At the same time, she called for “contested primaries,” calling them a strength of democracy — nodding at her fairly controversial endorsements of Hoffman and Rand Paul.

Palin swung quickly and heavily to foreign policy, with a litany of attacks on Obama — from his “personality”-based diplomacy to giving “Constitutional rights” to “homicide bombers,” using a term that’s rarely heard outside of Fox News, where she is a contributor.

When she moved back to domestic policy, Palin delved again and again into stories that are familiar to political junkies and Tea Party activists. “How’s that hopey-changey thing working out for ya?” said Palin, paraphrasing a slogan made popular on Tea Party t-shirts.” She mocked the stimulus package — the speech was heavy on mockery — by leaning slightly down and saying “nobody messes with Joe,” quoting a comment President Obama made that has been more or less forgotten outside of Tea Party circles.

Palin got rapt attention, and little crowd interruption — not even positive interruptions or cries of “Drill, Baby, Drill” — even as she tackled less sensational (and not really discussed during the convention) issues like nuclear power and buying insurance over state lines. But she was on more solid ground with one short clause about America being a place where “special needs children are accepted.” She started to choke up — the audience cheered, wildly, as if nudging her on to the next sentence while proclaiming its admiration for her son Trig.

“Each of us here is living proof that you don’t need a title to make a difference,” said Palin. “Let us not get bogged down in the small squabbles. Let us move on to the big ideas. To do so would be a fitting tribute to Ronald Reagan.”

After the speech, Judson Phillips and Palin sat down in two chairs (which sat rather awkwardly onstage during the speech) and engaged in a soft Q&A with questions from Tea Party Nation members, such as the top three things she’d do if she were president (energy, bipartisanship — it was rather confusing). She closed by addressing the controversy over her speaking fee.

“I am happy, honored, proud, to get any speaking check that was ever offered to me and to give it for the cause,” said Palin. “I will live and die for this cause.”

NASHVILLE — The 1,100 ticketholders for Sarah Palin’s speech have assembled in the ballroom after a lengthy wait outside. As promised, the dinner being served is steak and lobster, and from the view in the media risers there are few vegetarian substitutions.

“We put a lot of thought into the dinner, so it would be a tragedy if you did not eat it,” said Judson Phillips. “One warning: It is hazardous to your waistline.”

It’s never been clear whether Palin will stick around after the speech, but many attendees have grabbed copies of “Going Rogue” in the hope of getting it signed — at one table, copies of the book are sitting vertically, bookmarked by black pens. The convention schedule had a glossy photo of Palin on the inside cover, and copies of that schedule are sitting around, with the picture folded to the front.

The dinner’s opening prayer started with a plea for God to help America and ended with a prayer for “wisdom” for Palin, a “modern Deborah.”

NASHVILLE — Below are some photos I took at the National Tea Party Convention, featuring Tea Party merchandise, Palin 2012 signs and a few of the attendees.

NASHVILLE — Stan and Mary Hess own the United States Hot Air Balloon Team in St. Peter’s, Pa. All last year, they had a very direct involvement with the Tea Party movement, renting out balloons for American Prosperity’s climate change-skeptical “Hot Air Tour.” But they had never seen Sarah Palin speak — they’d “missed her by a day several times” during the 2008 campaign — so they added a stop to their Florida-bound vacation and paid $650 for tickets to her banquet speech.

The Hesses were some of the first people in line for Palin’s speech — they got in line at 3:30 local time, and it begins at 8. At 4:30 they were near the front of the line.

NASHVILLE — The woman dubbed by the Orange County Register as “queen of the birthers” arrived at the National Tea Party Convention today and did what she always does: hustle around talking to reporters and trying to get media coverage. Pictured below: Taitz talking to Lydia DePillis of The New Republic.

Taitz has a sort of media blackout policy on me — she has refused to talk since I posted a photo essay of the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot that featured, among other things, photos of her and of Third Reich memorabilia. Worse things can happen to journalists than being dissed by Orly Taitz — it saves a lot of time, and a lot of indulging a person who relentlessly brings up defunct or debunked legal arguments. But Taitz — who was recognized by quite a few people who stopped to shake her hand — did talk to other reporters, while hitting some speed bumps with others. For several minutes, she tried to make her case to Carl Cameron of Fox News, to no avail. As I spoke to John Avlon of The Daily Beast, Taitz ran over and asked Avlon when his book “Wingnuts” will be coming out and whether she could get a copy. (She’s profiled in the book.)

NASHVILLE — At 1 p.m., four representatives of Tennessee Tea Party groups gathered in a ballroom adjacent to the National Tea Party Convention with about 50 reporters and unleashed the criticisms that had dogged the event in the weeks leading up to it. They couldn’t afford tickets on their own. They had tried, and failed, to get Judson Phillips to set up a cheaper and larger convention.

“We were told they wanted to keep the convention elite,” said Anthony Shreeve, who’d alerted reporters to the press conference, saying that the word came directly from Judson Phillips.

But persistent questioning from reporters found the organizers hesitant to “bash” the convention or keynote speaker Sarah Palin. “We’re happy about the success of this convention,” said Jim Tomasik, a Tea Party activist from Cordoba, Tenn. “We’re impressed that they could get Sarah Palin.”

The activists attempted to promote the state-wide Tennessee Tea Party Coalition, which they set up in late January, passing out the one-page constitution they’d written and informing the press that the National Tea Party Convention didn’t represent any of their members. But the rest of the criticism was unclear, and they backed off whenever they realized they’d sounded harsh.

“So what’s your message?” asked Carl Cameron of Fox News. “Is it one of us and them?”

“Were you not here listening?” asked Tomasik.

“I was,” said Cameron.

At one point, the activists brushed off questions about Sarah Palin’s speaking fee. “We are capitalists,” said Antonio Hinton. “We don’t begrudge anyone for making money.”

But at another point, activist Mark Herr attacked Phillips for charging so much money for the convention to pay for Palin. “Government of the money, by the money, and for the money is unacceptable,” said Herr. The model for the Tea Party movement, he said, was more like the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition.

After the press conference, the activists backed off even further on Palin, rejecting the idea that negative press about the convention’s cost — buzz that included this press conference — should reflect badly on her.

“I want her to run for president next time,” said Tomasik. “I’m proud of her! She’s making some money. She’s not hurting herself at all.”

Some National Tea Party Convention activists who wandered by the scrum were annoyed at the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition’s antics.

“They’re trying to cause infighting between the tea parties,” said Vern Shockwell, a retiree from Nashville. “Theirs is a socialist goal, equality for everyone.”

“I go to a lot of trade shows,” said Lee Penner, a medical supplies salesman from Nebraska. “They’re expensive. How are you supposed to put on a convention and feed everyone and not charge for it?”

The activists hung around after the event to take more of that kind of criticism — some of it coming in a combative interview with Pajamas TV, which is livestreaming the event.

“It was a very tasteful press conference,” said Reese. “There’s a lot of controversy over it, so I wasn’t surprised that they wanted to ask questions about conflict. But what we weren’t here for that.”

NASHVILLE — During WorldNetDaily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah’s Friday night dinner speech, which spent around 10 of its forty minutes on questions about Barack Obama’s citizenship, Andrew Brietbart was among the conservatives in back of the room grumbling audibly about what he was hearing.

After he introduced the evening’s closing entertainment — a film titled “Generation Zero” — Breitbart walked outside to the convention hall. There, I heard Breitbart criticizing Farah, and briefly talked to him about it before I noticed that WorldNetDaily’s Chelsea Schilling was already talking to him, holding up a voice recorder. I backed up to allow her to continue her interview, which consisted of questions on why Breitbart didn’t think Obama’s citizenship was a legitimate issue.

“It’s self-indulgent, it’s narcissistic, it’s a losing issue,” Breitbart told Schilling. “It’s a losing situation. If you don’t have the frigging evidence — raising the question? You can do that to Republicans all day long. You have to disprove that you’re a racist! Forcing them to disprove something is a nightmare.”

“Wouldn’t you say,” asked Schilling, “in this case, that Farah is asking Obama to prove something rather than his disprove it?”

Breitbart rejected the premise. “When has a president ever been asked to prove his citizenship?”

After a few minutes Breitbart ended the conversation and Schilling started interviewing Tea Partiers about the speech, finding a little less skepticism. (I found some Tea Partiers, like Rita Grace of Virginia, who said they didn’t appreciate Farah’s speech.) I spotted Farah and asked him if his speech had been approved by Tea Party Nation.

“They asked me to speak,” said Farah. “They didn’t ask me, ‘What do you want to speak about?’ No, this operates like a free and open society, not like the kind of Marxist society you would apparently like to be a journalist for.”

I told Farah that his speech was getting negative attention already, and that Breitbart, who’d taken the stage after him, had criticized the “birther” parts of the speech. Farah shook his head and walked over to Breitbart in what seemed like an attempt to debunk my question.

“Andrew is my friend,” said Farah. “He has the right to disagree, and he has the right to say anything to a socialist newspaper that he wants. And if he wants to criticize his friend to you, and he’s dumb enough to do that…”

Breitbart raised his eyebrows. “I’m dumb to do what?”

“Criticize your friend to this socialist newspaper.”

“I was talking to her,” said Breitbart, pointing to Schilling. “I was talking to you. And I was saying that I disagreed on the birther stuff.”

“OK, well, did you know that Dave Weigel from The Washington Independent was”–

“I was talking to her,” said Breitbart. “She was asking me if I thought it was wise to bring it up, and I said, no. We have a lot of strong arguments to be making, and that is a primary argument. That is an argument for the primaries that did not take hold. The arguments that these people right here are making are substantive arguments. The elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts were all won not on birther, but on substance. And to apply to this group of people the concept that they’re all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue–”

“It is a winning issue!”

“It’s not a winning issue.”

“It is! It becomes even more of a winning issue when the press abrogates its responsibility–”

“You don’t recognize it as a fundamentally controversial issue that forces a unified group of people to have to break into different parts? It is a schism of the highest order.”

“Nothing exposes the president’s–”

“Then prove it!”

“The press isn’t asking the question–”

“Prove it!”

“Prove what?”

“Prove your case.”

“I should prove, what, a birth certificate that may or may not exist?” Farah had gotten irritated. “That’s ridiculous. You don’t even understand the fundamental tenets of what journalism is about, Andrew. It’s not about proving things. It’s about asking questions and seeking truth.”

Breitbart tensed up after that insult. “Right.”

“I know you’re not a journalist, so that’s fine. But don’t diminish people who’ve been doing this for 35 years.”

“So you’re going to go on record saying that I’m not a journalist?”

“Are you? I’ve never heard you claim to be. Are you?”

“I’ll let it be answered by you.”

“Well, I knew Drudge didn’t consider himself a journalist, so I assumed that you were. … I don’t know, I’m not trying to insult you.”

“You did.”

At that point, Judson Phillips — who had spotted a very small crowd around us — walked into the fray and tried to simmer everyone down with a joke.

“I can give you absolutely conclusive and definitive proof that Obama’s birth certificate does not exist. How else do you explain why Joe Biden is vice president?”

That more or less ended the conversation — Farah moved on, and agreed to talk more about why he and WorldNetDaily continued to pursue stories on Obama’s citizenship. The citizenship issue had stuck around and taken off, he said, “because of us.” He ran stories asking questions about the issue — including stories that were quickly debunked — because the rest of the media wasn’t asking the questions.

“Do you think this has made my life easier, doing this?” asked Farah. “I used to be on TV all the time. I haven’t been on Fox News once since I started talking about this.”

Asked whether he thought his speech created any problems for Sarah Palin — prompting reporters to ask why she patronized a convention with rhetoric like this — Farah rejected the premise.

“Sarah Palin is a big girl,” he said. “She can take care of herself. I have a lot of confidence that she’ll take care of herself well. … My objective is not to get Sarah Palin elected or something. My job as a journalist is to seek the truth.”

Update: Here’s audio of the Farah-Breitbart dispute:

NASHVILLE — WorldNetDaily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah gave a 40-minute dinner speech to the National Tea Party Convention and spent at least 10 minutes of it on jokes and meandering observations about the citizenship of President Barack Obama. The strangeness started with a joke about an “international medical convention” where an American doctor bragged about putting a guy with “no birth certificate and no brain” into the White House. Then Farah shared his ambition to make sure that “signs saying ‘Where’s the Birth Certificate’” appear at every Obama campaign stop in 2012.

Those comments got a positive reaction from the audience, but I felt Farah start to lose the room when he entered a long digression on how, in his view, there was more proof that Jesus Christ was born than proof that Obama was born in Hawaii. Farah moved on — but later, he joked that he couldn’t say how old Obama was “because he doesn’t have a birth certificate.” That got applause — and when he finished, he got a short standing ovation.

NASHVILLE — The author and Fox News analyst Angela McGlowan — one of very few African-Americans present at the National Tea Party Convention — used a short dinner speech to basically announce a bid against Rep. Travis Childers (D-Miss.). “I can’t announce it now,” she said, but on Monday, she’d announce something — and by the way, Childers “is about to lose his job!”

Joseph Farah, the editor in chief of WorldNetDaily, took the stage after McGlowan and ran with the ball. “I get to be the first person to formally endorse your quest!” Farah went on to give a speech that focused, for around 10 minutes, on his questions about Barack Obama’s birth certificate — about which I’ll write more shortly.

McGlowan’s speech was notable, too, for a really amazing bit of product placement. “Now why did I join the Tea Party movement?” she asked. “It was the same reason I wrote my book, ‘Bamboozled: How Americans Are Being Exploited by the Lies of the Liberal Agenda.’” She said the whole subtitle.

NASHVILLE — The closest thing to a controversy at the National Tea Party Convention has been the opening speech by former congressman Tom Tancredo, in which he complained that “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.” That remark led to the expected backlash, with plenty of people pointing out the history of literacy tests. And as Tancredo walked around the small convention area today, he talked into recorder after camera after notebook.

“I don’t want anybody to be refused the right to vote if, maybe, they have to mark [the ballot] with an X,” said Tancredo in a short interview with John Avlon of the Daily Beast. “I do think they should have to know something about how the government works.” He suggested using the citizenship test that immigrants take — maybe, he said, voters could take it “verbally.”

How did Tea Party organizers respond to the questions? Judson Phillips basically agreed with Tom Tancredo and called it a “fantastic speech.”

NASHVILLE — Justin Elliot picked up on my observation that Joseph Basel was here at the National Tea Party Convention and wondered how Basel was allowed to leave his home state of Minnesota before the Landrieu phone tampering case came to trial. I asked him.

“I’m on bond,” said Basel. “I just signed a piece of paper and I could go. I get pre-approval for travel outside of Minnesota, run by a supervision officer — I just gave him a call and said ‘I’m going to go to Nashville.’”

Basel pointed out that James O’Keefe had left his New Jersey home for New York to tape an interview with Sean Hannity. “We’re all fine,” he said. “It’ll all work out.”

NASHVILLE – At an alternately blunt and blustery press conference, National Tea Party Convention organizers Judson Phillips and Mark Skoda declared that they had credentialed 200 reporters and sold tickets to 600 attendees — with 500 more tickets sold for Sarah Palin’s Saturday night speech. (At least 100 of those reporters huddled around to ask questions.)

“We were contacted by at least a dozen networks from Germany,” said Phillips, offering one measure of the media’s interest.

In a conversation before the presser, Luke Livingston, the director of Tea Party: the Documentary Film, credited Skoda with turning around the “bad PR” and opening up the convention. When Skoda took the stage he unleashed a long monologue about the values and strength of the movement before announcing the formation of the Ensuring Liberty corporation and Ensuring Liberty PAC. It would be incorporated in “the heartland of America, Memphis, Tennessee,” and would employ a team that wasn’t yet assembled but might include “former K street people” who wanted to change the way Washington worked.

Skoda was peppered with questions on what money the PAC would accept. Corporate money? Yes. Lobbyist money? “We’ll determine that.” One thing that Skoda made crystal clear was that he and the Tea Party Convention “absolutely do not support a third party.”

A few reporters asked Phillips to respond to comments Tom Tancredo made in his Thursday night speech. Did he agree with Tancredo that a John McCain victory in 2008 would have been a disaster? “Congressman Tancredo has a gift for understatement.” Would he denounce Tancredo’s comment that Obama was a socialist and that his voters would have failed literacy tests? No, he wouldn’t denounce it — Phillips pointed to “man on the street” videos of voters that found many of them unable to state basic political facts.

NASHVILLE — Now for sale at the National Tea Party Convention: tea bag jewelry, courtesy of the Tea Party Emporium, a co-sponsor of the event.

NASHVILLE — The National Tea Party Convention’s early reluctance to give credentials to reporters — a decision that came after some negative commentary on the event’s cost and critics — was short-lived. Reporters are swarming the Gaylord Opryland Hotel and, with little exception, getting press passes. When I checked it around 11 a.m., more than 150 reporters had been credentialed. While there are around 600 paying attendees, the scene in the hall outside of the banquet and meeting rooms is basically one-to-one reporter-to-attendee. Inside the breakout sessions, at least three cameras are filming at any one time.

One of the credentialed reporters is no less than Joseph Basel, one of the four activists who was arrested — and let out on bail — for the mysterious botched sting of Sen. Mary Landrieu’s (D-La.) office. “I’m here for myself,” Basel told me, after chatting with Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit and Andrew Breitbart of Big Government.

NASHVILLE — Former congressman Tom Tancredo is the only former federal officeholder working the rooms at the National Tea Party Convention, and he followed up a fiery speech last night with a short address today at a breakout session on immigration run by Numbers USA. He informed a crowd of older-skewing activists that Tea Party-style activism helped sink immigration compromises in the Bush era.

“I faced two big problems in Congress,” said Tancredo, “the Democrats and the Republicans. … The only way we got anything done was to go around Congress.” Tancredo pointed at his audience. “This kind of thing translates.” By the end of his tenure in Congress, said Tancredo, “I had to put on my tennis shoes and sprint to the floor to introduce an immigration amendment, because everyone else was doing it.”

Roy Beck, the executive director of Numbers USA, made the case that stopping illegal immigration was the key to solving most of America’s economic problems. “We imported the health care crisis!” said Beck. “Every year we import one to one and a half million immigrants, and most of them go on welfare.” Beck provided cards with graphs that purported to show how illegal immigration was at the root of America’s biggest problems, and proposed five fixes: Rep. Phil Gingrey’s (R-Ga.) HR 878, which would ban chain immigration; Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s (R-Va.) HR 2305, which would end the lottery; Rep. Heath Shuler’s (D-N.C.) SAVE Act (HR 3308); employment visas; and a SAVE system in general.