A Tea House Divided
Clarence Page

Leaders of the tea party movement reacted angrily to the NAACP's call for the movement to purge "racist elements" from its ranks. Then, a few days later, one of the movement's biggest organizations did precisely what the NAACP had advised.

Lesson: It's easier to appreciate an idea after you've decided that it was your idea in the first place.

The National Tea Party Federation, an alliance of 85 member and affiliated organizations, according to their website, expelled its most prominent faction, the Tea Party Express. That move came after the Express' spokesman Mark Williams offered the world a breathtaking example of the sort of racism that tea party leaders had long denied was much of a problem -- except maybe in liberal groups like the NAACP.

Williams offense came in a satirical jab he posted on his blog, aimed at Ben Jealous, president of the organization formally known as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The satire was in the form of a letter from what Williams called "Colored People" to President Abraham Lincoln. Williams' humor only went further downhill from there.

"Dear Mr. Lincoln," he began. "We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don't cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop...!"

Lesson: If you care about your public image, do not fill your spokesman position with a nutty political talk show host.

This internal tea party schism should be interesting. Tea Party Express has some muscle behind it. Its well-attended national bus tours feature big names like Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher -- and raise big money for conservative candidates.

The Wilson schism illustrates what Matthew Continetti, associate editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, characterized in a recent cover story as "The Two Faces of the Tea Party" as represented by two cable TV stars, CNBC's Rick Santelli and Fox News' Glenn Beck.

Santelli probably ignited the tea party movement from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in February 2009. He famously called for protests against what he saw as the moral hazards in President Obama's Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan.

Despite striking differences between Santelli and Beck, who embodies the insane TV anchor Howard "Mad as Hell" Beale in the movie "Network," the two men easily represent what Continetti calls "the dual nature of conservative populism."

Unlike Beck's crowd, Santelli did not call Obama a "socialist" or challenge the president's legitimacy or patriotism. He even wrote a month after his on-air rant that "I hope that the president and the final stimulus plan succeed" because "I love my country." He may not get his own radio talk show with sensible talk like that, but he captures the best of this country's optimistic, even-handed spirit.

It's not hard to imagine Santelli's conservatism as "easily integrated into a conservative Republican party" as Ronald Reagan's in the 1980s, Continetti writes, "with an affirmative agenda of spending cuts, low taxes, entitlement reform and free trade." Maybe not. But in the meantime, the Grand Old Party has to wrestle with the Beck style --as paranoid, pugnacious and polarizing as that which cost Barry Goldwater a landslide loss in the 1964 presidential race.

Warning the right of "the twin temptations of intellectualism and exuberance" in the scholarly National Affairs magazine, Henry Olsen, vice president at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, also describes a critical divide within the tea party and other populist movements from America's past. "The challenge for conservatives," Olson concludes, "is to propose alternatives that offer a real change of direction without seeming too radical." So true.

Thinking conservatives understand. With so much at stake, then, the tea party movement should quietly thank the NAACP for doing them a favor. The tea party needs to purge embarrassments like Williams from their ranks, not just to please the NAACP (fat chance of that) but for the sake of their movement's future. They need to reassure fellow conservatives, as well as the moderate voters the movement's favored candidates will need if they are going to win elections.

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The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

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