POLITICO.COM : The Great "Stop Mitt Romney" mood and force inside the Tea Party - Romney is incredible unpalatable for most Tea Partiers - Tea Party Radio and television ads and get-out-the-vote efforts against Romney

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POLITICO.COM -
Tea party dilemma: What to do about Mitt Romney -
By KENNETH P. VOGEL -
June 24, 2011 -


Tea party dilemma: What to do about Mitt Romney


Some excerpts of a very long article :

The anybody-but-Mitt Romney faction developing within the tea party may pose a problem for the former Massachusetts governor’s presidential ambitions, but some tea party organizers worry it could also backfire against the movement itself.

Romney, the current Republican front runner, is viewed skeptically – at best – by many tea partiers. And disagreement over whether to actively oppose him threatens to undo the uneasy truces forged in the run-up to the 2010 midterms and undermine the fledgling movement’s influence in the GOP.

The possibility of Romney winning the nomination is even reviving debate about whether activists should embrace, or even form, a third party – an idea that until recently had been dismissed as harmful to both the movement and the GOP.

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Another tea party leader, Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, describes the presidential election as a potential “Achilles heel” for the movement, which arose in 2009 in opposition to what its activists saw as unchecked government spending and expansion under President Barack Obama.

“Our power comes from the fact that we’re not dependent on anybody to be the leader,” Kibbe told POLITICO, conceding the tea party’s diffuse and decentralized nature may be better suited to congressional races than presidential politics.

Nonetheless, this month, FreedomWorks, which had a $14 million last year, signaled it will mobilize tea party voters against Romney in states holding presidential primaries after New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation contest. Another, much smaller tea party group, Western Representation PAC, hopes to mount a $500,000 Stop Romney Campaign that will focus on New Hampshire and include radio and television ads and get-out-the-vote efforts.

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But Stockton and Kibbe both said that Romney is so unpalatable to tea party activists that the movement could consider backing a third party candidate instead of working for him in the general election.

“If the Republican Party nominates an establishment Republican who’s wrong on healthcare, who’s wrong on cap and trade and our core issues, tea partiers could stay home or they could go third party,” said Kibbe.

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And he added in an interview with POLITICO that among the people “I talk to – coordinators, activists, and the hundreds of thousands of people on our Facebook page – there is virtually no support for Romney.”

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