People who watched the Tea Party Convention in Nashville on television in early February saw and heard an angry crowd, unanimous in its acclaim for every speaker. Standing ovation followed standing ovation, the fiery crackle of applause was nearly continuous, and so were the whistles, whoops, and yells, the Yeahs!, Rights!, and cries of "USA! USA!" Inside the Tennessee Ballroom of the Opryland Hotel in Nashville, it was rather different: what struck me was how many remained seated through the ovations, how many failed to clap, how many muttered quietly into the ears of their neighbors while others around them rose to their feet and hollered.
It wasn't until the last night of the event, when Sarah Palin came on stage, that the Tea Party movement, a loose congeries of unlike minds, found unity in its contempt for Barack Obama, its loathing of the growing deficit as "generational theft," its demands for "fiscal responsibility," lower taxes, smaller government, states' rights, and a vastly more aggressive national security policy. "Run, Sarah, Run!" everyone chanted, though if Palin could have seen inside the heads of the 1,100 people at the banquet, she might have felt a pang of disquiet at the factional and heterogeneous character of the army whose love and loyalty she currently inspires.
I went to Nashville not as an accredited reporter but as a recently joined member of Tea Party Nation. (I had my own quarrels with big government, especially on the matter of mass surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, and the rest, and I counted on my libertarian streak to give me sufficient common ground with my fellow tea partiers.) When I presented my Washington State driver's license at the registration desk, the volunteer said, "Thank you for coming all this way to help save our country," then, looking at the license more closely, "Seattle—you got a lot of liberals there." I accepted his condolences.
As we milled around in the convention center lobby, we might easily have been mistaken for passengers on a cruise ship. We belonged to a similar demographic: most—though by no means all—of us had qualified for membership of AARP a good while ago; 99.5 percent of us were white; in general, smart leisurewear was our preferred style of dress. (The TV cameras made far too much of the handful of exhibitionists in powdered white pigtail wigs and tricorn hats, and of the peculiar, bug-eyed gentleman from Georgia, who was sometimes costumed as an eighteenth-century American revolutionary, sometimes as a kilted Highland chieftain, his copper tea kettle lashed to both outfits, and spoke to his many interviewers in a hokey and ponderous English accent.) Few of us would see much change from the $1,500–$2,000 we'd spent on travel to Nashville, the $558.95 convention fee with service charge, a room at the hotel, and a couple of drinks at the hotel bars, where a glass of the cheapest wine or whisky cost $12. Seen as a group, we were, I thought, a shade too prosperous, too amiably chatty and mild-mannered, to pass as the voice of the enraged grassroots.
I asked one woman whether she'd been part of "9/12," as tea partiers call the great taxpayer march on Washington, D.C., last September. No, she'd missed it, she said, and "felt really guilty" about doing so, but she and her husband had been on vacation.
"Where did you go?"
"We spent a week in Amalfi, then we toured Tuscany, then we spent a week in Rome."
Another woman, hearing my accent, told me about her and her partner's second home in Torquay, England, which they visited three times a year from their base in Atlanta, and about their thirty-five-foot powerboat, in which they'd crossed the Channel to Le Havre and cruised down the French canals to Marseilles.
Most of us were political novices. When we were asked how many attendees had never been involved in politics before joining the Tea Party movement, roughly four out of every five people raised their hands. On the outside balcony where the smokers gathered, I was joined at a table by an intense, wiry, close-cropped, redheaded woman from southern Virginia who dated her conversion to hearing Sarah Palin for the first time.
"She was me! She's so down-to-earth! If Sarah was sitting here with us now, she'd be just a normal person like you and me. You could say anything to her. She's not like a politician—she's real. And Sarah always keeps her word. If Sarah promises something, you know she'll do it. She's just am az ing."
Before Sarah, the woman said, her interest in politics had been limited to voting in general elections. Her one big involvement was with her church. Now she was traveling around the country on behalf of Team Sarah and Conservative Moms for America, a fundamentalist group whose "Conservative Moms Pledge" begins with a quote from the first epistle of Saint Peter: "Wives, likewise, be submissive to your own husbands, that even if some do not obey the word, they, without a word, may be won by the conduct of their wives, when they observe your chaste conduct accompanied by fear."
In the last year, she'd marched on 9/12, gone to CPAC—the Conservative Political Action Conference—and attended a string of acronymic events, which she recited to me. Soon she'd be off to New Orleans for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.
[...]
We said prayers, recited the Pledge of Allegiance (with the words "under God" pronounced as if they were underlined and in bold type), and clapped in time with the beat of country music. Lisa Mei Norton, a former Air Force senior master sergeant, sang, "The shining light, on the right, the left just doesn't get,/Sar—ah Palin for change you won't regret...." It would have taken a finely calibrated stopwatch to measure how very rapidly such folksy piety and patriotism could swivel into crude nativism, conspiracy theory, and xenophobia—and to measure, too, the dawning discomfort at this switch of tone registered by a sizable part of the audience.
The first night's speaker, Tom Tancredo, ex-congressman from Colorado and no-hope presidential candidate in 2008, gave a taste of what was to come as he warmed up the audience with a show of self-deprecating, clownish good humor...The drollery vanished as he climbed aboard his old anti-immigration hobby horse...Though a ripple of cheers and applause spread through the ballroom, I was taking my cue from a middle-aged couple sitting immediately in front of me. When they clapped, I clapped. When they rose to their feet, I did too. Now they exchanged a hard-to-read glance and their hands stayed in their laps...everyone I'd met so far was in a position to know immigrants, legal and otherwise; they employed them in their houses and businesses, to look after their children and work on their yards. The idea that Maria and Luis, or Tatyana and Dmitri, had somehow subverted the political system to bring about Obama's election struck them as insulting and absurd.
Something very similar happened the next night, when Joseph Farah, the author and impresario of the right-wing news site WorldNetDaily, took to the stage. Farah, self-consciously handsome, with his swept-back gray hair and bootblack chevron mustache, spoke in that tone of patient, inexorable, commonsensical logic that seems equally distributed between long-tenured professors and certified lunatics. He took us on a quasi-scholarly tour of the first chapter of Saint Matthew's gospel, where Christ's genealogy is traced from the patriarch, Abraham, down through many generations to "Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ," then invited us to compare Jesus' unassailable ancestry with Obama's dubious family tree. "I have a dream," Farah said. "And my dream is that if Barack Obama even seeks reelection as president in 2012, he won't be able to go to any city, any town, any hamlet in America without seeing signs that ask, 'Where's the Birth Certificate?'" Again, I saw as many glum and unresponsive faces in the crowd as people standing up to cheer.
[...]
I was off to the smokers' ghetto after Farah's speech, so missed the confrontation in the lobby between him and Andrew Breitbart of Breitbart.com, another prominent and forceful speaker at the convention. But David Weigel of The Washington Independent, who was live-blogging from Nashville, was himself caught up in the row, and captured it on audiotape. Breitbart attacked Farah for raising the "birther issue" because it was "divisive."...
Out with the smokers on the freezing balcony, I was feeling sufficiently at home with my fellow attendees to voice, as mildly as I could, my own impatience with the birther stuff and the Cloward-Piven strategy. I wasn't surprised to find people agreeing with me. "Stupid," a woman said. "My first thought was, 'This guy's a liberal plant.' I thought we came here to talk about taxes and government spending and national defense."
[...]
Only once did I find myself with a group of people from whose company I was glad to escape. At dinner on Friday, our eight-person table was talking—somewhat facetiously—about emigration. "We may have to leave this country sooner than we thought," a woman said, and laughed. Australia was mooted as a possible destination. "Well, you could have gone to Australia once," said a beefy man in his sixties, with coiffed silver hair and matching beard, the alpha male of the table; "but now they've got another liberal in charge—even in Australia."
The woman's husband shook his head, and said, "It may still come to shooting," the tone in which he made the remark delicately balanced between eagerness and regret.
Then conversation swerved on to the subject of Obama, "the idiot," "missing a few marbles up here," "that nitwit." (It's curious how the Tea Party view of the President exactly mirrors the way the left talks about Palin: both are self-evidently stupid.) Obama was an unknown quantity when he was elected. He had no record, no experience; he was an empty suit about whom we knew nothing.
"Well," said the alpha male, producing his ace of trumps, "we knew he was black."
I heard—and joined in—some grumbling about the religiosity of the event. "It's Tea Party Nation," a woman said. "They're a very religious group. You notice how they won't serve alcohol at dinner?" Another told me that several people had left a "breakout session" she'd attended, apparently because they'd taken offense at the copious prayers. "It's a regional thing. This is the Bible belt. You don't see this at Tea Party groups in the Southwest."
This wasn't a trivial issue. It's one thing for pro-life evangelicals and secular libertarians to march shoulder to shoulder behind banners saying "Kill the Bill!" and "Oust the Marxist Usurper!" or displaying a portrait of Obama rouged up and kohled to look like Heath Ledger's Joker in the Batman movie Dark Knight. It's quite another to coop up the same people for three days in a hotel, where they must talk to each other through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the march on D.C., there were T-shirts proclaiming "I am John Galt" and "Atlas Has Shrugged" alongside others that said "Obama Spends—Jesus Saves" or had the legend "Yes, He Did" beneath a picture of Christ on the cross. At Opryland, devout, abstemious Christians were breaking bread with followers of Ayn Rand's gospel of unbridled and atheistic self-interest. The convention, designed to unite the Tea Party movement, was helping to expose fundamental differences of belief and mindset between people who, before Nashville, had appeared as interchangeable members of a single angry crowd.
[...]
Whatever cracks and fissures had begun to open beneath our feet during the convention were instantly healed by Palin's appearance on the platform. A great wave of adoration met the small, black-suited woman, as she walked to the microphone with a sheaf of papers. The entire ballroom was willing Sarah to transport us to a state of delirium with whatever she chose to say, and perhaps our expectations at the beginning of her speech were a guarantee that we'd leave feeling rather let down at the end.
[...]
It happened that a Washington Post /ABC poll was being conducted as Palin was speaking (the convention ran from February 4 to 6, the poll from February 4 to 8). Palin's numbers were down across the board, among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. More than 70 percent of respondents said that she's unqualified for the presidency, up from 60 percent in November last year. Even among "conservative Republicans," only 45 percent think her qualified, down from 66 percent in November. No significant shift of opinion was observed between the 6th and the 8th. But it's the provenance of the poll that tea partiers will have seized on. The Washington Post and ABC News? What else would one expect of the liberal, lamestream media?
Full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23723