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Tea Party redux

Nick Carey was invited on MSNBC last night to talk about his Tea Party special report. Here’s what he had to say:

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Hell hath no fury like a Tea Party scorned

Here’s what Nick Carey had to say today about his special report “Stuck between the Tea Party and a hard place.”

By Nick Carey

Not long after the battle over the 2011 fiscal budget in Washington ended in mid-April, I received a few emails from Tea Party groups expressing frustration with the apparent failure by the Republican Party establishment to follow through on promises that they would cut spending in that budget by $100 billion.

I passed on one of those emails to an editor in Washington and we agreed that it would be a worthwhile exercise to talk to Tea Party groups across the country to see if that frustration was widespread, or if it was merely restricted to a few groups.

My very first call was to a Tea Party member in the South whom I had talked to before for previous special reports on the movement. I told him about the emails I had received and asked if he was frustrated by the budget deal. His answer: “Frustrated? I’m f***ing angry!”

At that point, I knew I was onto something. Dozens more interviews followed with Tea Partiers in 20 states, with all of them to varying degrees expressing anger and disappointment at what they see as an act of betrayal by the Republican Party.

Tea Partiers worked hard for a Republican win last November, driven by rage at President Barack Obama’s health reforms and egged on by Republicans many of whom professed that they, too, were Tea Partiers who would fix the mess in Washington with massive spending cuts. That message was simple and clean cut.

In Gatsby country, tea and red ink

Located just east of New York City and the setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel “The Great Gatsby,” Nassau County makes an unexpected backdrop for a fiscal crisis. It is one of America’s wealthiest counties and, according to Forbes, it has the highest concentration of affluent neighborhoods in the United States.

But on Wednesday, New York state took control of Nassau’s finances, dealing a huge blow to Tea Party Republican County Executive Edward Mangano and a black eye for the Tea Party, the grassroots movement built around the core principles of constitutionally limited government, free-market ideology and low taxes. The county, which has vowed to battle the takeover in court, must now come up with a new budget.

In some ways, the county’s predicament remains highly unusual. It has for years been plagued by overspending and the state created a fiscal overseer in 2000 to help shore up its finances. But in other ways, Nassau’s dilemma is familiar to struggling municipalities across the country: how to arrive at a balanced budget when anti-tax fervor sweeps the country and sales tax revenues are still well below their pre-recession levels.  

Edith Honan and Kristina Cooke went to the “Gold Coast” to investigate for a Reuters special report: “A Long Island tax cut backfires on the Tea Party.”

See a multimedia PDF version of the story here.

Spoiling the party

Last month The New York Times had a story about Arizona Republicans putting up homeless people as candidates for the Green Party in elections there. Now Murray Waas, our Barlett & Steele award winner, has a special report about Democratic Party shenanigans. 

Waas went to Pennsylvania’s 7th district to show how Democrats helped get Tea Party activist Jim Schneller (left) on the ballot, hoping to siphon off votes from the Republican candidate.

This is what one Democrat involved in the scheme had to say:

Abu Rahman, the president of the Delaware County Asian American Democratic Association and a Lentz supporter, who admits he gathered signatures for Schneller, said in an interview that he had some mixed feelings about what he was doing. “I remember thinking to myself that this is not clean,” Rahman said, “But it is not illegal.”   

 He acknowledged in an interview that by helping Schneller get on the ballot, he clearly understood that he was going to “dry up Republican votes.”  

 Rahman explained why he moved forward despite his reservations: “We really had to consider what was at stake. This is a really crucial election. We don’t want to hand it to the Republicans. It’s just too, too important for our country.”

Politico has a story on this subject today as well.

Following the money in O’Donnell’s campaign

Mark Hosenball has been in Delaware and Pennsylvania reporting on the midterm election campaign for our special report “Conservative donors let Christine O’Donnell sink.”

If that’s not enough O’Donnell for you, here’s his report from a bastion of conservative thinking in Delaware:

By Mark Hosenball

Republican Delaware senate candidate Christine O’Donnell may be the darling of both national and local Tea Party groups. But she’s not particularly beloved at one of Delaware’s most august and esteemed conservative organizations.

Among the more venerable institutions of modern American conservatism is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, an organization based in a mansion in suburban Wilmington. The Institute, dedicated to the promotion of conservative principles on American college campuses, has an impeccable pedigree: its first president was the godfather of American conservative thought, William F. Buckley Jr.

But if records filed in Federal court in Wilmington are any guide, it is one of the Delaware conservative organizations least likely to be campaigning aggressively in support of Christine O’Donnell’s Senate bid. This is because both the Institute and O’Donnell are still smarting over an ugly lawsuit O’Donnell filed against the group after she claimed that they had unlawfully fired her as their director of communications and public affairs in 2004.

Highlights from O’Donnell’s grievance against the Institute, originally written up by O’Donnell herself in a rambling 55 page Federal Court complaint, were reported in the conservative Weekly Standard magazine shortly before the Delaware GOP primary and then given added publicity on the Delaware Republican Party’s official website.