A national tea party organization is slamming Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for being a “weak, Beltway elite candidate who failed to campaign forcefully on America’s founding principles — and lost.”

“What we got was a weak moderate candidate, hand-picked by the Beltway elites and country-club establishment wing of the Republican Party,” Tea Party Patriots National Coordinator Jenny Beth Martin said. “The presidential loss is unequivocally on them.”

The rebuke of Romney from Martin came just minutes after the networks called the presidential race for President Barack Obama. It’s the strongest criticism the group has leveled at Romney.

Now that Romney has lost, the group apparently has no qualms about criticizing him.

“We wanted a fighter like Ronald Reagan who boldly championed America’s founding principles, who inspired millions of independents and ‘Reagan Democrats’ to join us, and who fought his leftist opponents on the idea that America, as founded, was a ‘Shining city upon a hill,'” Martin added.

Martin said the tea party movement is “not going away,” saying that tea partiers “will turn our attention back to Congress, to fight the battles that lie ahead including balancing the budget, repealing Obamacare, cutting the debt, holding the line on the debt ceiling, and the many other issues that will arise to threaten America.”

“With the catastrophic loss of the Republican elite’s hand-picked candidate — the tea party is the last best hope America has to restore America’s founding principles,” she said.

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