Lately the Tea party has not made headlines. The occupy movement and presidential campaign has regulated tea party stories to the back pages, but this weekend General Colin Powell made a statement on This Week with Christiane Amanpour that is worth examining:
…(the) Tea Party point of view of no compromise whatsoever is not a point of view that will eventually produce a presidential candidate who will win.
His words got a lot of play around the net and on the cable news stations.
What didn’t get as much play was a Twin City Tea Party event in Leominster Massachusetts the very next day.
The first topic on the agenda was a discussion of redistricting in Massachusetts, not an odd topic for a Tea Party event.
What would be odd to Colin Powell and those who give him credence are the guests who came to talk about it, Republican State Rep Kim Ferguson and Democratic State Senator Jen Flanagan.
Yes you read that right, a republican state rep and a democratic state senator together talking about the system, the vagaries of redistricting and taking all kinds of questions from the Tea Party crowd, blissfully unaware of the supposed divisiveness that the media says they should have encountered.
That would surprise some national observers but what followed would do so even more.
The Twin City Tea Party president Justin Brooks announced that he would be resigning to running for State representative for the Leominster district. Again that in itself is not odd; many tea party members have run for state or local offices nationwide. The request he made of the group, THAT was amazing.
He suggested the Tea Party should not endorse him or any candidate, he suggested instead they invite his democratic opponent Dennis Rosa, who had spoken to them before, to the group again and hear what he had to say, then individually decide who would do the better job.
On a day when I attended and covered Barney Frank’s retirement announcement the concept of a candidate asking a friendly group to consider the qualities of his opponent before deciding on who to vote for was the most surprising political story of the day.
General Powell may see the tea party as a divisive group but like those who ascribed the type of violence we’ve seen with the occupods to tea parties in the past, the reality of the situation is visible to anyone who lives outside the media's plastic bubble.
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