By JERRY BOWYER By
Pittsburgh
For the past several weeks the tea party movement has been widely maligned as radical and dangerous. For example, former President Bill Clinton, in a speech and a New York Times op-ed, has cautioned that supporting tea parties could unleash violent militias. The Southern Poverty Law Center released a report claiming they are “shot through with rich veins of radical ideas, conspiracy theories, and racism.”
None of this fits with what I’ve seen. The tea parties I’ve spoken at in western Pennsylvania resemble church picnics—although their growing potency may be a signal of things to come on the national scene.
The Keystone State’s tea party movement actually began several years ago—on July 7, 2005, at 2 a.m. That’s when our state legislature rammed through a pay hike for its members and the state’s judiciary. Because the state’s constitution prohibits legislators from collecting pay increases in the same year they were passed, legislative leaders called the pay hike a reimbursement for expenses that required no documentation or simply “unvouched expenses.”
The reaction was both explosive and immediate. Editorial pages and radio show hosts denounced the pay hike while voters took to the streets of their capital city with placards and bullhorns and giant inflatable pigs. The movement became broadly known as Operation Clean Sweep.
But rather than wait for an electoral thumping, legislators fought back in ways that made voters more upset. In what came to be called BonusGate, some legislators under taxpayer fire allegedly gave their staffers bonuses with state money and time off to work for their political campaigns. When all the tallying was over, about $3.6 million had been given to incumbent legislative staffers, 80% of whom had “volunteered” for their bosses’ campaigns.
After the 2006 election, 17 legislators were swept out of office. The powerful president of the state Senate, Robert Jubilirer, was replaced by a mild-mannered rural county commissioner. The second most powerful man in the Senate, Chip Brightbill, was ousted by a tire salesman.
State Attorney General Republican Tom Corbett followed up with a slew of indictments related to BonusGate, which have been slowly working their way through the courts. In 2008, Democratic state House member Frank LaGrotta pleaded guilty to two conflict-of-interest charges for hiring members of his family for no-show state jobs. Others fought the charges. Last month, Mike Veon, the second most powerful Democrat in the state House (who lost his seat in 2006) was convicted of using state funds to illegally give staffers bonuses to work on his re-election campaign.
Over the past year, Operation Clean Sweep rebranded itself into a tea party movement. But it’s still the same people—mostly veterans, stay-at-home moms, and others who were never active in politics before—with the same aim of electing officials who are better acquainted with voter concerns than the trappings of power.
One of the favorite new targets of tea parties is U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter. Many people will remember his tense town-hall meetings last summer, where he faced tough questions about his support for health-care reform. But that wasn’t the first time tea parties took aim at him.
Months earlier Mr. Specter faced a backlash after voting with Democrats for the $787 billion stimulus package—he didn’t seem to understand at first that the same people who rebelled against the pay hike would hate the stimulus package. But he realized he couldn’t win a Republican primary fight against tea party favorite and former Rep. Pat Toomey. Mr. Specter bolted the GOP in April 2009 to become a Democrat.
Far from being a fringe movement, the evidence clearly indicates that the tea party movement has grown to become a mature political actor capable of influencing the course of Pennsylvania politics.
Mr. Specter faces not only Mr. Toomey but also Rep. Joe Sestak, who is challenging the senator in next month’s Democratic primary. Over the past several months, there have been several barbs traded among these men. But there is one thing they all agree on: The tea party movement is a serious political force. Mr. Specter points to his willingness to personally face tea party questioners as proof that he has the toughness to win a general election fight. Mr. Sestak, in a recent debate with Mr. Toomey, went out of his way to say the tea party movement deserves respect. And Mr. Toomey has called the movement a “check on the otherwise unchecked and unlimited power of one party.”
All three men, it seems, have come to understand that the tea parties are a mainstream political phenomenon capable of providing the margin of victory in close elections.
Mr. Bowyer is the author of the upcoming “Free Market Capitalists Survival Guide,” to be published by HarperCollins, and chairman of Bowyer Media, which produces the television program “Pennsylvania Newsmakers.”
