Tea Partiers Plan To Combat 'Phony' Tea Party Candidates By Spelling Out T-E-A

Tea party activists in Florida who insist they are the real thing are about to mount a public education campaign to rebrand a group of candidates as fakers who won't adhere to principles of the movement.

Tea partier Tim McClellan, a political strategist based in Pompano Beach who is suing the Florida Tea Party, has a plan to prevent those Tea Party candidates from winning, and it involves spelling. He believes the 20 official Tea Party candidates we wrote about yesterday are phonies with ties to the Democratic party and an intent to confuse voters.

"I'll be doing a junket to explain to anybody who will listen," McClellan told TPMDC in an interview. His approach will be to brand the candidates he considers fake by convincing everyone to call them the "T-E-A" party, with the hope that voters wooed by the tea party movement won't associate that Florida Tea Party with the activists who attend rallies and don't want official party status.

The strategy to differentiate the different tea partiers has its roots in the fact that (TEA) is what will appear after candidates' name on the fall ballot in the same way (DEM) or (REP) would be listed next the names of major party candidates. He plans to travel to the districts where the candidates he believes are fake are running and ask for press coverage to try and spread the word... or rather, the letters.

McClellan said the Florida Tea Party members are "opportunists" who "are not part of the tea party." That's one reason he's involved in a lawsuit we've been tracking for months. He said that Fred O'Neal has tried to delay the lawsuit until after the election. O'Neal and the other Florida Tea Party officials I interviewed yesterday say they hold fiscally conservative tea party principles and say people who don't like them are just kissing up to the state's Republican establishment.

But McClellan said until the lawsuit is resolved it's "up to me or people like me" to act as a sort of truth squad to expose the candidates he thinks aren't truly party of the movement.

"This has the potential to disrupt and destroy the political system as we know it, they are taking advantage of innocent, true Americans who stand with signs that don't deserve for their name to be misused," McClellan said.

Meanwhile, Roll Call today detailed the numerous ties between Rep. Alan Grayson and more than one member official Tea Party. We'll have more on that later.