{"id":10638,"date":"2011-07-27T14:51:05","date_gmt":"2011-07-27T18:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=10638"},"modified":"2011-07-27T17:02:05","modified_gmt":"2011-07-27T21:02:05","slug":"tea-party-to-gop-backing-for-your-presidential-nominee-not-assured","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/10638\/tea-party-to-gop-backing-for-your-presidential-nominee-not-assured\/","title":{"rendered":"Tea Party to GOP: Backing for Your Presidential Nominee Not Assured"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week, Ashton took a look<\/a> at the Tea Party’s irritation with the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Just as in 2008, the Tea Party believes (with good reason) that the NRSC is trying to put its hand on the scales during Republican primaries and shut conservative challengers to establishment incumbents out of key races throughout the nation.<\/p>\n

This may not be the biggest stage on which the Tea Party movement refuses to be broken in 2012, however. This will be the first presidential election since the movement has congealed, and Tea Party leaders are making known that they don’t intend to squander their leverage. Per a report on the Daily Caller<\/a> today:<\/p>\n

The country\u2019s largest Tea Party\u00a0organization is warning that the future GOP presidential nominee shouldn\u2019t automatically count on having the support of its grassroots activists.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was some controversy that was created when another Tea Party group came out and said the Tea Party movement would line up behind whoever is the Republican nominee,\u201d Mark Meckler, a national coordinator for the organization, said during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast briefing with reporters Wednesday. \u201cI think that\u2019s presuming an awful lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTea Partiers are very independent folks by nature,\u201d he said in response to questions from The Daily Caller, \u201cthey make their own decisions, there\u2019s no organization, no leader to tell them what to do.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two things are striking about this development. First, the fact that members of\u00a0the Tea Party — which is now into its third year on the American political scene — still have to explain that they are a leaderless movement unified around a set of loosely-defined core principles is remarkable, particularly when that explanation is directed at Republicans, who should be conversant in Hayek’s concept of “spontaneous order<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

Second, the Tea Party — long predicted to be co-opted by the GOP — is still boldly staking out its independence. That means any Republican presidential candidate hoping to inherit the keys to the White House will have to satisfy the conservative Tea Party base, establishment Republicans, and a fair number of independents. If that sounds like a tough road to hoe, it is. But it comes with one great virtue — any candidate with such a broad appeal would be an electoral lock. And if he (or she) lived up to those principles once sworn in, it could create just the kind of political coalition needed to unwind the dangerous excesses of the Obama years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The conservative insurgency won’t sign off on just any Republican presidential candidate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[914,2336,143,2198,1885,614],"class_list":["post-10638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-2012-presidential-election","tag-2012-senate-races","tag-barack-obama","tag-daily-caller","tag-f-a-hayek","tag-tea-party-movement"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10638"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10641,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10638\/revisions\/10641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}