Tea Party

Tea Party Group To Corporations: Support Obama And We'll Take You Down

Evan McMorris-Santoro | November 23, 2010, 11:45AM

A tea partier holds a sign at a March 2010 health care protest.

The tea party movement has a new target: Corporate America. Leaders of FreedomWorks, Dick Armey's branch of the conservative revolution, tell US News' Paul Bedard that the tea party movement is now ready to go to war with companies that the group says endorse "President Obama's progressive agenda."

On the short list are General Electric and Johnson & Johnson. Their crimes: "Their initial focus" of FreedomWorks' anti-corporate war "will be on consumer firms that lobbied for passage of Obama's agenda items that helped their firms." Those items include: "healthcare reform, bailouts, cap-and-trade energy policies or other issues pushed by the administration."

How will FreedomWorks take out these corporate giants? Through what it says will be a series of massive consumer boycotts Bedard likens to past anti-corporate protests mounted by Jesse Jackson.

"[A] Tea Party boycott could be bigger and impact the political world in Washington where corporations are generally viewed as supporting Republicans," Bedard writes.

Read more »

DE-SEN

FreedomWorks Backpedals On O'Donnell, Too (VIDEO)

Evan McMorris-Santoro | September 16, 2010, 12:24PM

Despite what you may have heard, Christine O'Donnell was not universally backed by the tea party. Sure, O'Donnell rode to victory in the Republican primary for Senate in Delaware on the back of financial support from the Tea Party Express and endorsements from tea party favorites Jim DeMint and Sarah Palin. But some prominent tea party leaders were still wary of her political baggage in the days before the primary vote. Chief among them was Matt Kibbe, president and CEO of FreedomWorks -- one of the largest tea party umbrella organizations out there. That all changed on Fox News today.

On Monday, Kibbe and FreedomWorks chairman Dick Armey told reporters that the group wasn't getting behind O'Donnell, who Kibbe -- at the time -- said "can't win" the general election. Armey even took the establishment GOP position on the race best embodied (until extremely recently) by Karl Rove.

Asked by a reporter if, when it came to Delaware, "it's better for Republicans to lose with a tea party-backed candidate than to win with a mainstream Republican candidate, Armey gave a direct answer

"No," he said.

That was then. Now, after the ultra-right has spent close to two days crowning O'Donnell its new queen, FreedomWorks is having a change of heart.

Read more »

Dick Armey

Tea Party Group Wants Jews, African Americans And Hispanics

Evan McMorris-Santoro | September 14, 2010, 8:30AM

Former Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX)

FreedomWorks, the big daddy of the tea party-sponsoring organizations, is the latest to make an attempt at shedding the movement's all-white image. The group recently announced DiverseTea, a targeted advertising and outreach campaign aimed at extending the tea party's reach into minority communities. After a summer of attacks on the tea party (most notably from the NAACP, which accused the tea party movement of harboring racist elements -- a criticism tea partiers reject out of hand), FreedomWorks is the latest to get on the diversity train.

"We do need to reach out," FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe told me at a meeting sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor Monday. Kibbe said the new initiative will "build a platform" for tea party leaders from across the spectrum, including "African Americans, Jews, Hispanics," and others. Kibbe said that though it's important the group reach out, the talk of diversifying the tea party is more about changing the perception of the movement rather than the reality.

"There is this nagging perception that we are not diverse, and I disagree with that," he said. Kibbe told me after the meeting that the plethora of diverse voices on stage at rallies like Sunday's 9/12 meeting in Washington (where a virtually all-white crowd was regaled by numerous African American and Latino speakers) was part of a concerted effort to show minorities that they're welcome at tea party events.

[TPM SLIDESHOW: Tea Partiers Storm DC For Second (And Smaller) 9/12 Rally]

FreedomWorks chair Dick Armey -- the former congressman and bombastic public face of the organization -- was a bit more grumpy when it came to discussing the racial makeup of tea party crowds.

Read more »