Back in April, when Scott Brown was a no-show for a Tea Party rally on the Boston Common, the activists who helped propel him into office didn’t take it personally. It was a non-issue, they told me; Brown was busy looking after their interests in Washington. But as Adam noted, the Tea Party’s love affair with Brown has soured. And now that the nation’s newest Senator has announced his support for financial reform, the backlash has begun in earnest, with former fans flocking to Brown’s Facebook page to pen blistering notes assailing him for the decision.
I asked Christen Varley, head of the Greater Boston Tea Party, what she was telling members disillusioned by Brown’s support of FinReg. “We’re looking at this pragmatically. A yes vote on this is going to be really tough to get over, but again, Martha Coakley is not our Senator,” says Varley, whose group held two rallies to protest the bill and sent Brown’s office hundreds of letters urging him to vote no against the measure. “With cap and trade coming down the pike and some sort of immigration reform, we’re going to want to knock on that door again. So we’re not throwing in the towel.”
Varley, who pointed to a Sept. 2009 interview in which Brown appears to oppose financial reform, said she would be “hard pressed to keep [Brown’s] bumper sticker on my car.” But she noted that in order to optimize its impact, the movement has to stress electability. “Can someone more conservative than Scott Brown win a primary in Massachusetts and win an election?” she asks. “He may be the best we can do.”
Whether this sort of reasoning will appease jilted backers is another question–and one emblematic of the latent battle within the movement, which will ultimately have to choose whether it wants to support a small number of candidates who demonstrate absolute fealty to its tenets, or make concessions in order to exert greater force at the ballot box.
The Greater Boston Tea Party released a statement that reads in part: “Tea Party activists will continue to independently support candidates and current representatives that adhere to our constitutional principles of limited government, free markets and individual liberty. If Senator Brown wants our continued support, he must consider how legislation he supports upholds these principles.”