Are Rainmakers Crashing the Tea Party?

The first National Tea Party Convention seems to have scored a coup by securing Sarah Palin as the keynote speaker for next month’s confab, which organizers are billing as an opportunity to gather groups from across the country to bring their movement “to the next level.” But the convention’s lineup and eye-popping registration fee have raised questions about whether the Tea Party fringe will succeed in maintaining its popular momentum as the right-wing establishment begins to come on board.

Appearing alongside Palin at the event will be Republican Reps. Michele Bachmann and Marsha Blackburn, members of the GOP’s far-right flank who rallied the Tea Partiers on Capitol Hill last month. They’ll be joined by established stalwarts from the religious right, including former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice Roy Moore—infamous for refusing to remove a display of the Ten Commandments from his courtroom—and far-right preacher Rick Scarborough, a follower of Jerry Falwell's.

There’s growing talk of the Tea Partiers turning into an official third party, maintaining its outsider status by issuing primary challenges to Republican candidates. But the national convention’s speakers list “looks a lot like a prayer meeting of the right wing of the Republican Party,” as Ed Kilgore notes, questioning whether the movement might turn into “a hard-right takeover bid aimed at turning the GOP into a mirror image of its ideological obsessions, ranging from gun rights to anti-immigration sentiment to radical reductions in taxes and spending.”

Given the populist appeal of the Tea Party brand, it’s no surprise that the religious right and other established factions of the GOP would try to jump aboard—and that Tea Party organizers with national aspirations would welcome them as they try to increase their political traction. But these established groups also operate according to the dictums of any Beltway political machine, using their base to raise funds and support their national operation. And such an approach has already alienated some of the true believers who are still its animating base.

The Tea Party convention, for one, is charging $549 per person for the event—no doubt to pay for Palin’s speaking fee, reportedly as high as $100,000—which has left some supporters queasy about the entire production. “This is the beginning of the end of it as a ground-up movement. Let the co-optation begin,” writes one pro–Tea Party blogger. The buckracking echoes the arrival of groups like the Tea Party Express, which used the name of the grassroots insurrection to raise funds for a longstanding Republican political action committee. As Stephanie Mencimer has reported, such developments have led to major clashes with groups like the “Tea Party Patriots,” who’ve adhered to the anti-establishment, grassroots ethos that originally founded the movement.

Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before the Tea Partiers give themselves over to the well-oiled money machine to gain greater leverage over the institutions they want to topple; such a model certainly did wonders for the religious right. But the movement could also undermine its own efficacy—and grassroots, small-scale fundraising potential—if it dives head first into the buckracking establishment bent on returning to power.