Review of the Article of the Tea Party Against Barack Obama

The article “The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism” refers back to 2010 the 23rd of March when President Barack Obama signed into the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act. Which resulted in a group of forty plus Tea Partiers holding a meeting in Brockton, Massachusetts hours after the law had been signed as they were totally against it.  Tea Partiers showed advanced knowledge, shared tips on how to contact a registered republicans list for each district and also held group discussions to produce ideas and solve problems about how to convince Tea Party members to run in neglected legislative races. 

Looking at November 2008 elections when an African American Democratic presidential candidate won the elections and the outgoing president George W. Bush was very unpopular and also Mc. Cain’s failure in the campaign left the Republicans without a dear leader, at the same time the high ranking Republicans were not united hence leading to debate whether the Republican party was headed to a long term decline. The Tea Party was against Barack Obama and his initiatives, hence they made sure that they took every available opportunity to protest against him. There has been a little in depth Social Science scholarship on the development and organizational characteristics of Tea Party activism, little probing of the nuanced beliefs of members and supporters and little consideration of possible political effects of this new variant of right-wing activism. 

By offering an empirical analysis rather than normative commentary, the article aims at helping fill this void. The Tea Party includes a small minority of Americans and these people are mainly the older, white and middle class. Those who support the Tea Party are usually found to have higher incomes more than the typical Americans and the majority of the Tea Party participants are conservative Republicans, many whom have been politically active in the past. The research strategies used in the article include collecting data from the national surveys of the demographic and attitudinal characteristics of the Tea Party activists, advocacy organizations and information on activism and ideology from various local and regional Tea Party websites. The data was enriched with fieldwork observations and personal interviews were carried out with the Greater Boston Tea Party, adding on an email questionnaire was also distributed to Massachusetts activists. The Tea Parties are not under the Republican National Committee nor any state party organs, but instead they are a mix of local networks, resources deploying national organizations and conservative media outlets. Looking at the grassroot level Tea Parties tend to be small they use online organizing tools and the best website is Meet Up has been widely used by Tea Partiers as it enables face to face meetings. They are two advocy organizations closely associated to the Tea Party and these are the The Tea Party Express which is a project of the Republican Run political action committee “Our Country Deserves Better” and the Tea Party Patriots, whose website was up and running within days of the original Santelli rant, by more closely associated with grassroots activism. The national organizations that promote Tea Party are most closely tied to pro-business conservatism rather than church linked social conservatism. According to the article FOX is the primary source of political information for Tea Party activists. There is a serious distinction between people who do not work and those who work. According to the Tea Party ideology the activists see themselves as the most productive people. Racial resentment strokes Tea Party fears about generational social change and fuels the Tea Party’s strong opposition to President Obama. 

Overall, looking at the side of immigrants the Greater Boston Tea Party members expressed their concern that outsiders might bring inappropriate or racist signs to protest and wanted to make sure that there was a plan to remove those people. The Tea Parties were against Obama as they believed that he was a Marxist or socialist and some believe that he did not have any great positive plans for America.