Author: Judd Berger

The so-called “birther” movement apparently is alive and well at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville.

While the bulk of the three-day affair has been spent on strategizing for the 2010 elections and figuring out how to grow the conservative activist base, convention-goers shifted their attention from tax-and-spending complaints to President Obama’s citizenship during a rousing speech after dinner Friday night by WorldNetDaily.com founder Joseph Farah.

Farah, a conservative newsman whose raison d’etre of late has been to challenge Obama’s eligibility to be president, used the bulk of his remarks to hit that point — and got quite a welcome reception from the hundreds of tea partiers in the room.

“Where’s the birth certificate?” he asked, echoing the words from a controversial billboard campaign he started. “It’s a simple question and it has not been answered.”

The room burst into applause. When he first brought up the issue, Farah got a standing ovation.

The WND head proceeded to contrast the supposed genealogical evidence behind Jesus’ birth against the evidence behind Obama’s birth.

“God didn’t want there to be any doubt about Jesus’ eligibility or qualifications to be the king of kings,” Farah said. “There’s a lesson in this story for Barack Obama. His nativity story is much less known.”

He said Americans are being asked to “accept on faith” that Obama is a citizen.

Obama’s presidential campaign released a copy of his “certification of live birth” showing he was born in Honolulu. But that hasn’t settled the issue among hardened skeptics, as some theorists argue that’s not official enough and want more proof.

For the most part, conservative commentators and mainstream Republicans have stayed far away from the “birthers,” viewing it as a sideshow that does little to advance conservative causes.

Those at the tea party convention seem to have a multitude of causes, with fiscal responsibility and lower taxes topping the list — but fears about Obama, and the possibility of the country somehow losing its identity and power, cut through.

The convention has treated patriotism as a lost art that it’s trying to revive. Former Rep. Tom Tancredo’s opening speech Thursday focused on that theme.

Before Farah spoke, convention organizer Judson Phillips held an impromptu Pledge of Allegiance, saying he’d had many requests. So the room full of dinner guests stood up, held their hands over their hearts and pledged themselves to the flag, after a hearty “USA!” chant.

I wonder if the original Boston Tea Party organizers waded through breakout sessions and slideshow presentations in order to figure out the best way to throw a tea bag (which, for the insatiably knowledge-hungry, is with a flick of the wrist, head tilted to the side, like you’re skipping a stone).

Either way, workshops and seminars are how the modern tea party movement is trying to get equipped for its own revolution of sorts.

Participants at the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville have sat through more than a dozen of them since the affair started Thursday afternoon. The corporate-style environment is a far cry from the noisy, impassioned rallies that characterized the movement over the past year. But these people are trying to organize in the 21st Century. And they have high hopes.

Here are just a few of the goals laid out in Nashville: The tea party movement will recruit through college campuses. The tea party movement will harness the power of the Internet to build the kind of Web-based network that, in the last presidential election, the Democrats were far more adept at creating. The tea party movement will register voters — the tea party movement will register LOTS of voters.

“It’s not rocket science. I mean, ACORN does it,” conservative activist Bridget Blanton said of voter registration drives at a session Friday on getting conservative women more involved. “If they can do it, we can do it — much better, and legally.”

She urged tea partiers to set up a voter registration table at every rally and make it a centerpiece of every meeting.

Jordan Marks, executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, coached convention-goers on how best to get young people involved.

“They’re not receiving the education in the classroom,” he said, urging anyone who lived through Communism to “mentor” a young person on that history. He suggested “fun” activities — for instance, holding a “knock down the pin heads of communism” bowling night.

A few hours later, Colorado-based tea party organizer Lori Christenson pep-talked a room full of supporters on how best to engineer a local tea party start-up. The group tossed around ideas on the best ways to incorporate, the best places to hold meetings and the best way to get a presence on the Internet.

Christenson had some search engine optimization tips — try to include the words “tea party” and the state where the group will be based as part of the official title, “so it comes up on a Google search.” She plugged her Web platform of choice — meetup.com — as participants studiously jotted down notes.

One thing was clear out of the sessions Friday. The movers and shakers in the tea party movement are no longer interested in simply making political noise. They’re interested in the 2010 midterms.

“Victory will be measured at the ballot box,” Blanton said.

The National Tea Party Convention isn’t just about spreading the gospel of fiscal conservatism and figuring out ways to crush President Obama in 2012. For some, it’s a chance to get in on the ground floor of what may be a tea party market.

Take Jeffrey McQueen. A former auto industry worker out of Michigan, he was laid off last year. “Sometimes God has other plans for us,” he said as he got settled at the convention in Nashville Thursday.

McQueen ended up designing a flag to represent the tea party movement. He says he’s sold 5,000 since June and word of the product is “spreading from porch to porch.”

McQueen is part of a mini-economy that’s started to sprout up around the conservative tea party movement. And that economy is out in full force at the first-ever convention.

In between costumed tea party “delegates,” the politicians and pundits looking to create some kind of synergy out of the whole thing and the event organizers are tea party peddlers, whose stalls line the entrance to the convention ballroom in Nashville.

They’ve got flags, they’ve got T-shirts, they’ve got DVDs, they’ve got jewelry – all designed with tea party buyers in mind.

McQueen, who is involved with the tea party movement in Michigan, got some attention to his flags when, on a bit of a whim, he took them to Massachusetts as he followed Sen. Scott Brown around on the last leg of his successful campaign for Senate.

“I sold 350 of ‘em in three days,” he said.

Then there’s Tea Party Emporium, a New York company that sells “freedom tea,” “freedom coffee,” and most curiously, tiny tea bag pendants.

“The Republicans have their elephant. The Democrats have their donkey. And the tea partiers needed their emblem,” said Natalie Humphrey, marketing director for the company, which sends part of its proceeds to the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The Tea Party Convention is sponsored in part by the Tea Party Emporium, along with dozens of other organizations. The for-profit side and grassroots activist side are closely intertwined in Nashville.

On the first night, convention-goers watched a screening of “Tea Party: The Documentary Film,” while executive producer Luke Livingston stood outside selling DVDs at a discounted $15 apiece.

“It’s gonna sell like crazy,” he said. Livingston said he’s already sold 5,000.

But the producer, who put up $20,000 to make the film, said the documentary serves a purpose. He said it helps refute the “angry mob label” and offers buyers something they can take to show their families what they’re involved in.

“The film doesn’t hammer Obama. It’s not a hit piece. It’s inspirational,” he said.

The first-ever National Tea Party Convention started with a bang Thursday, as conservative firebrand Tom Tancredo used his kickoff speech to rail against “the cult of multiculturalism” and the country’s “socialist ideologue” president — and declare that the tea party movement is here to stop it.

“The race for America is on right now,” the former GOP Colorado congressman told the crowd in Nashville. “You have launched the counter-revolution.”

And so it begins. According to convention organizer Judson Phillips, the event’s 600 tickets have sold out. Tea party supporters from all across the country arrived at the Gaylord Opryland hotel Thursday for a weekend of strategy sessions, workshops and speeches.

The convention is much, much smaller than the party-sanctioned Democratic and Republican ones, but the opulence of the Opryland grounds — and the $500+ ticket price — give it the air of something more official.

The convention-goers who traveled here range from the mere fiscal conservative to the all-out President Obama basher.

“To me, Obama’s the enemy of this country, and he’s not the only one,” said Harley Clinton, who traveled from Maryland with his wife, who sported an OBAMA T-shirt — with the letters spelling out “One Big Awful Mistake America.”

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.

It’s unclear whether the convention will result in a more unified tea party movement, or a more loose-knit and multi-faceted one. Some activists showed up to learn how to better organize local chapters at home.

Tracey Anderson, a real estate broker from Indianapolis, said that’s why she came. And she said, so far as she can tell, this isn’t the start of a whole new party.

“It’s a movement of, we’re sick of it — listen to us. We’re sick of you making decisions without listening to the people who you work for,” she said. “It’s conservatism. … It’s not a new party. It is a movement.”

The tea party movement has been effective in disrupting the balance of power from within the GOP. Some tea party-supported candidates are gaining steam in various GOP primary races across the country. But Scott Brown, who had the support of both tea party and non-tea party in his successful run for senator in Massachusetts, appeared to be the de facto guest of honor in Nashville — though he was hours away getting sworn in to the Senate.

Tancredo gave Brown a shout-out in his speech, which drew ecstatic applause and cheers from the audience. And he even borrowed Brown’s pitch line.

“I’m Tom Tancredo … and I drive a Harley,” Tancredo said.

No hard feelings.

That’s what Judson Phillips, organizer of the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville, says about the decision of two prominent conservative congresswomen to pull out of the event just days before it started.

“It’s a non-issue,” Phillips told FoxNews.com, as the convention got under way Thursday afternoon inside the sprawling hotel oasis known as the Gaylord Opryland.

Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn., and Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., were originally set to speak at the first-ever convention of tea partiers, but the two decided to cancel after a House ethics committee review raised questions about the way profits from the event would be used. The event sponsor, Phillips’ Tea Party Nation, is a for-profit company.

No sweat, Phillips said.

“They’re still two of my favorite people, so we’ve got no issue with that,” he said.

Phillips said Bachmann and Blackburn both called him “personally” to convey their support for the event despite their withdrawal. It’s for the best, he argued.

“I think they were being set up and I agree 100 percent with their decision, because I didn’t want to get dragged up to Washington to be a witness at a show trial,” Phillips said.

The prelude to the first-ever tea party convention was not without its hiccups.

Aside from the Blackburn-Bachmann pullout, some activists raised questions about the high price of the affair — $549 for the whole convention and $349 to just see Sarah Palin, who is still scheduled to speak on closing night. Other sponsors and participants canceled as well.

Phillips was not so forgiving in discussing the decision of American Liberty Alliance to pull its support last month.

“That was a really odd situation,” he said. “They kind of pulled that stunt.”

On its Web site, American Liberty Alliance has questioned how the profits from the event will be used. In a posting a few days ago, the group said any attempt by the convention organizers to “point fingers” at those who backed out is “unfortunate, and reconfirms our original suspicions about the nature of those putting the event together.”

As for the pricey nature of the convention, Phillips tried to justify it.

“We’re trying to put on a really spectacular event for the people who are here,” he said.