I’ve been to Tea Parties in DC and my hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. I’ve shared the freaks, and I’ve been upfront about some of the crazies that attend events (including this guy in Chattanooga), but I’ve honestly never encountered racism.

While racist people probably have attended a Tea Rally somewhere in the country, I’ve encountered thousands and thousands of people at these rallies. The most racist ones are the LaRouche supporters that cling like barnacles to any organized events. They happen to provide convenient cover for video cameras and clever editing. The overwhelming majority are too concerned about fiscal issues to give a damn about something like race.

Why then would the NAACP formalize a charge of racism towards Tea Parties?

Could they possibly want attention? Had the NAACP not made an issue of this, would anyone have noticed that they had their annual conference this week?

What news is going on right now? The BP leak, Old Spice guy, high unemployment, Bristol & Levi, FEC filings for the 2nd quarter, iPhone 4 issues, Lindsay Lohan…

In this environment, social issues struggle. While the abortion debate was renewed because of Obamacare, and the media’s obsession with Sarah Palin has reinvigorated feminism debates for the first time since the Reagan Administration, most social issues struggle during times of financial turbulence.

Unemployment is high, the housing market has crashed, the stock market fluctuating, and taxes are about to hit historically high increases. Frankly, debating social issues feel like a luxury. If we look at issues in the public debate, they match Maslow’s Pyramid. When you’re hungry and jobless, do you care about PETA? Folks who work in philanthropy for social causes only understand this too well.

How do social issue groups make money? Get in the news. How do you get in the news? Somehow peg your group to a current news story. What always makes the news? Charges of racism.

This was a win-win for the NAACP. They got everyone talking about them. Since being a liberal is more important than actually advancing the causes of your race or gender, they don’t care if they tick off Tea Party folks. The media, who are already biased against this grassroots movement since it interrupted Obama love, always enjoys controversy. The NAACP had more to lose by not taking this strategy and playing fair than striking out at Tea Parties.

Adrienne Ross wrote an excellent post about alleged racism and Tea Parties.

The notion that the Tea Party movement is racist is one that has no proof to support it. I have attended tea parties in both Wasilla, AK and Kingston, NY. (See pictures.) And from the Last Frontier to New York’s first capital, I can say that the participants treated one another like family. I was neither mistreated nor ignored. I was not made to feel I did not belong. There was not one racist sign. No one spit on me. No one called me the ‘N’ word. Rather, we had one purpose in mind: to boldly declare that we want to restore sanity to our nation. People protested President Obama’s policies, not because of his race, but because of the dangerous path on which he is steering America. I certainly didn’t attend these tea parties because I have a problem with our president being a black man. However, I was also not going to refrain from attending simply because I share the same skin color as our president. While this is what many on the Left expect of me, I am nobody’s puppet. I think for myself. And I refuse to reside on anyone’s plantation, including any political plantation.

Ross picks up on issues that I wrote about earlier this week. Any deviation from some liberal-approved path is wrong. Empowering individuals, regardless of sex, race, income level or religion, to make their up their own minds and creating a society that allows them to act on those opinions is apparently not the meaning of “equality.”

Anyone who has legitimately given the Tea Party movement a chance will agree with Ross’ assertion:

I wish the Left could just be honest: the Tea Party movement isn’t about race, and they ought to know it. It’s about America. It’s about doing what’s best for the future of a country God blessed us with. And if the President can’t handle the heat of being criticized, then he shouldn’t have signed up to take on an adult job when he only had a child’s experience. It’s that simple; I don’t care what color he is.

Right now, liberals can’t respond to the fiscal debate, so they change the topic. 18 months into Obama’s presidency, everything he touches fails miserably. The American people can only be viewed as an ATM for so long. Liberals know they’ll have to answer for this eventually, so they’re desperate to change the conversation. There’s no better issue than the one that has dogged our society for fifty years now.

As a woman, I get sick of how my uterus is constantly used to win political points with certain factions of our political system. Aren’t black people sick of that happening with their skin color? We won’t be able to enter our post-racial world until the Democrats stop crying wolf.

Racism is terrible, and it does exist. However, until there is solid, irrefutable evidence that racism does occur at Tea Parties, the NAACP and liberals do more harm to their cause. Every fake call of racism cheapens all attempts to repair race relations and call out bigotry. But then winning political points and losing the issue war is pretty much how all liberal causes operate.

It wasn’t because Ron Paul will be the nominee in 2012. The odds are overwhelmingly against him.

It’s not because the majority of attendees were supporters. They weren’t. It was fairly split among a lot of different candidates or undecideds.

Ron Paul won the straw poll because two organizations manipulated it.

Dr. Paul is successful because he appeals to a fanatical base of supporters. They are sizable, but they aren’t the majority of conservatives, nor are they a majority of Tea Partiers. They have two extremely well-organized and motivated organizations, Campaign for Liberty (C4L) and Young Americans for Liberty (YAL). Having worked with a number of YAL chapters, the individuals drawn to those organizations will walk through fire for Dr. Paul.

I’ve witnessed first-hand what these groups will go through. Think about the Paul moneybombs and countless activism events. Do those reflect the majority of conservatives out there? Absolutely not. It should not surprise anyone that there was likely a concerted, organized effort to manipulate the outcome of the poll.

To understand CPAC, you have to understand the set up. The Marriott is huge with multiple levels. At every single escalator and staircase, Ron Paul supporters were bombarding you with information. By day three, it was obnoxious, especially for people like me who were busy running around and working.

You also need to understand how the straw poll is collected. CPAC places poll locations throughout the conference on Day 1 and Day 2. The actual instrument is lengthy and can take 10 minutes or so to complete. Note that the poll is completely self-selective. The people who take it are the ones who are either eager to share their opinion on the 2012 race or have the time to take it.

As I’ve written numerous times, I have no idea who I will support in 2012. I also didn’t have much free time on Day 1 and 2, when the surveys were collected. When I went to take the poll on Day 3, it had closed. How many people were like me and simply forgot to take it? We’ll never know.

What you’ve not seen reported in the media is the actual number of participants in the poll. There were around 10,000 registered attendees, yet only 2,395 people volunteered to participate in the poll. Barely 25% of attendees participated in the poll! Of those 2,395 people, only 31% supported Dr. Paul. That breaks down to around 743 votes. 743 people out of 10,000 is hardly worth mentioning.

While I agree with Patrick Ruffini that this is a good sign that younger people are motivated for conservative/libertarian causes and that the model of C4L and YAL should be replicated throughout the movement, it does not show that Dr. Paul is the leader of the conservative movement.

The media is obsessed with declaring that someone is the leader in order to fixate on that person and destroy his/her credibility. They want it to be Rush or Palin because those are already polarizing figures. Dr. Paul would be nearly as good because of the fringe movement that surrounds him. It’s easier to silence the uprising of Americans when they are painted as far-right loonies.

Please understand that I respect Dr. Paul. I agree with him on most subjects. The issues of foreign policy and the military are my two biggest objections. This post is not to tear down the efforts of C4L or YAL. I know many people involved with those campaigns, and they have my respect and admiration. However, take the Paul victory with a grain of salt. When you combine low participation with a group of highly-mobilized, highly-connected volunteers, it is possible to manipulate the results.

After growing increasingly frustrated on Twitter yesterday, I decided to put up a post that gave some background and perspective on the Tea Parties. Aside from a supporter of the Tea Parties, I’m not an official organizer. However, I tracked both conservative insider information and media stories on the issue and wanted to address some of the issues that both Joe Lance at Tennessee Ticket and Dan Lehr at Public Interest brought up yesterday in their thoughtful posts.

Not a Sex Act
Many people were suddenly introduced to several new words this week: teabagging (which won’t be explained in this post. Google it yourself) and astroturfing in what I would call a blatant attempt by the media to misdirect the real meaning behind Tea Parties. Fiscal conservatives and frustrated taxpayers throughout the country have followed the progression of Tea Parties since Rick Santelli, online editor for CNBC, came up with the idea out of frustration earlier this year.

The first Tea Party was held in Chicago and erupted into a grassroots movement by fiscal conservatives and libertarians who were tired of not standing up for their values. The idea spread and on February 27, approximately 40 cities held tea parties with more than 30,000 people in attendance. Smart Girl Politics, the DontGo Movement and Top Conservatives on Twitter pushed the idea out to the thousands of conservatives who had flocked to Twitter in order to organize.

Interestingly, this coincided with CPAC, the annual gathering of conservative activities in Washington, D.C. The 2009 CPAC ended up being the largest one ever in its 30-plus year history. More than 10,000 conservatives converged on Washington happy to be free from the shackles of big-government, Bush Republicanism and anxious to reclaim the movement that Edmund Burke started more than three centuries ago.

The situation was perfect. Grassroots conservative leaders and conservative organizations saw the power of Tea Parties and recognized the frustration that many average Americans were facing with the bailout and stimulus acts. What was started as a pure grassroots movement was harnessed by the larger groups such as FreedomWorks, Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions, and every conservative leader who’s formed a PAC including Mike Huckabee (I’m on all their email lists and watched it unfold). When Sean Hannity, Fox News and Rush Limbaugh picked up on the idea and started spreading the news to the masses, I can understand how the left made the argument for astroturfing (fake grassroots. Get it?). For more information astrotufing vs. grassroots read Patrick Ruffini’s post at The Next Right.

But Conservatives Don’t Get the Web? Right?
To understand the origins of Tea Parties, readers must first get the state of the conservative movement. It’s been tough for conservatives over the past few years. While we had an “R” in the White House, President Bush rarely reflected any form of conservativism–limited government or fiscal conservatism. Stifled by a party holding a death grip on anyone who dissented with the President and angered by the left who hurled insults at anything hinting at conservative or Republican, we really couldn’t do anything but wait for the administration to end and possibly face an even worse McCain administration or the horrors of an Obama socialized government.

To make matters worse, Republicans had watched the left leapfrog over them in new media and organize through online tools. We knew that this was the future of the web, but top party leadership ignored us.

Some of us, aware of the power of the Internet, started organizing. Using the tools that Obama is now famous for, we flew under the radar and jumped on a new, little-known platform known as Twitter.

Everyone now knows about Twitter, but for the past two years, this has been one of the main ways that Conservatives organized. Conservatives individualistic pundits by nature compared to socialistic-leaning collectivism on the left. That’s why we write on our virtual soapboxes rather than comment and build a community like the left (DailyKos, Talking Points Memo). Twitter gave us the ability to express our own thoughts (in 140 characters or less) while creating a network of activists throughout the country. Talk radio has been credited with the rise of conservativism in the 90s. Twitter will likely account for the re-organization of conservatives in the future.

The DontGo Movement was the first step of the Tea Parties. Emerging in August 2008 when Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi refused to address the rising energy costs, several House members turned to social media to revolt. Tweeting from Blackberries in the dark on the House Floor (Pelosi ordered the lights off an CSPAN’s camera’s turned off), these Republican Congressmen kept communicating through Twitter, blogger conference calls and holding press conferences on Ustream. A few Twitterers took notice and using the hashtag to organize, created the #dontgo movement.

This developed into Top Conservatives on Twitter (#tcot) and Smart Girl Politics (#sgp), who all ended up leading the charge of the Tea Parties.

So Who Organized it?
It made me laugh yesterday to see the attempts to label the Tea Parties as astroturfing. These parties were so grassroots that in many cities people who have never been involved in politics organized them. I have never heard of the two people who organized the one in Chattanooga. Other active Republicans were clueless too.

In fact, the Tea Parties were so grassroots that Republican strategists complained that the movement seemed disjointed. Conference calls were chaotic because people who have never organized events were running these things. If the media only researched instead of reposting talking points or White House conference calls. Note that I wasn’t involved in the Tea Party development aside from a few tweets. However, I followed the progress and tracked insider reports as well as media stories. The frame expressed by most newspapers, CNN and networks couldn’t have been more different than how it happened.

In an era when George Soros funds “grassroots efforts” on the left to loud acclaim, I’m left wondering what on earth is grassroots anymore? Is it possible to organize a nationwide movement without money, staff time and resources? No. Does that mean that the minute and existing organization with those capabilities steps in it ceases to be grassroots? I don’t believe so. However, like so many things on the left, definitions change to suit their purposes.