Bill Bruss gives away plastic bags in the vendor area at the National Tea Party convention. Tea partiers attack convention

NASHVILLE – Four Tennessee tea party activists who said they couldn’t afford the $550 tickets to the National Tea Party Convention staged a guerilla news conference just outside of the event to challenge its representation of the movement.

“There are a lot of citizens in the state of Tennessee today who could not afford to be here… particularly in this economy,” said Antonio Hinton, a 37-year old tea party activist from Knoxville. “They’re just as patriotic. They’re just as concerned. They care just as much about what’s going on as the folks that are in that room.”


The convention’s steep ticket price, combined with its top-down organizational structure and the $100,000 speaking fee its organizers paid keynote speaker Sarah Palin all fly in the face of the grassroots tea party movement, Hinton and his three cohorts asserted in a quickly put-together press conference outside the convention hall.

About 40 journalists and camera people from the heavy media contingent covering the convention gathered around the four dissidents in a hotel lobby outside the entrance to the banquet room hosting most convention activities, as curious convention-goers crammed their necks to get a look at the spectacle, after which some challenged assertions made by the four.

All four of the men protesting the convention are part of a recently formed coalition of 34 tea party groups from around Tennessee that does not include the group behind the convention. The four contended the coalition, the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition, is more representative of the conservative populist movement, whose members have nonetheless chafed at being associated too closely with the Republican Party and its political leaders.

The coalition recently held its own, less lavish convention at which it formalized a mission statement drafted by 58 delegates from around the state. It states “our objective is to restore the United States Constitution to that direct authority which our Founders, and the Consent of the Governed, originally intended,” and calls it “the duty of the governed to take back the reins of control, and to remove the shackles forged by our own apathy, that have chained our Liberty.”

The Tennessee group has greater claim to the tea party banner than does the Convention, which was tightly controlled by a handful of organizers, said protester Jim Tomasik, a 47-year-old iron worker from Cordova, Tenn.

Tomasik credited the convention organizers with landing Palin, who he said is “probably not going to show up to talk to us because we couldn’t afford her.”

“We don’t need Sarah Palin to be the face of our movement,” he said. “We don’t need Newt Gingrich or any of these other people, because these people are humans and they can fail. Our values will never fail us as long as we adhere to them.”

Two of the activists, Anthony Shreeve and Mark Herr, were involved in the early stages of planning the convention, but said they resigned in protest after disputes with lead convention organizers Judson and Sherry Phillips.

Sherry Phillips contends that they and others were banned from the group planning the event for incivility and indiscretion.

After the impromptu press conference, Judson Phillips, fired back at Shreeve and Herr.

“Since we announced this convention back in October, their whole focus has been against us, not to do something good or to advance the conservative cause,” said Phillips. “They don’t like me? Fine, I don’t care. If they want to go out and do events that are going to help our movement go forward, God bless ‘em. Because of the personal relationships, I’m not going to be a part of what they’re doing. They probably don’t want me. And that’s fine with me.”

Phillips has taken heat from his former allies and others in the conservative movement for the unusual finances of the group running the convention, Tea Party Nation, and its $100,000 contract with Palin’s speaking agency.

As first reported by POLITICO, Tea Party Nation is a for-profit company that also operates a social network site by the same name. Phillips intends to turn a profit from the convention, with the stated goal of seeding a so-called 527 group that would air ads praising conservative candidates or criticizing their opponents.

But on Saturday he said there likely wouldn’t be much profit, and whatever money is made will go to a second convention he’s planning for July.

This article tagged under: National Tea Party Convention