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).<\/p>\n
Either way, workshops and seminars are how the modern tea party movement is trying to get equipped for its own revolution of sorts.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
She urged tea partiers to set up a voter registration table at every rally and make it a centerpiece of every meeting.<\/p>\n
Jordan Marks, executive director of Young Americans for Freedom, coached convention-goers on how best to get young people involved.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“Victory will be measured at the ballot box,” Blanton said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5227,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5227"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284226\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}