“They don’t get it,” Judson Phillips, a Nashville lawyer who organized the National Tea Party Convention last month, told the Beast. “They freaking don’t get it.” Phillips said he disagreed with the characterization of small donors as “reactionary” and motivated by “fear.” “Our motives are patriotic,” he said. “Can they be any more insulting? I guess they could have called us teabaggers, but Holy Cow, I’m so blown away by the whole thing I’m just sitting here stunned.”
A spokesman for FreedomWorks, the activist group led by Dick Armey that helped organize the first Tea Party protests, called the presentation “inept and silly.”
“I’m just kind of shocked,” the group’s spokesman, Adam Brandon, said. “I don’t get what they were trying to accomplish… if I were them I’d try to say we’re strong on policy and we’re going to get the energy of these Tea Party activists and earn their trust. That seems a much more compelling message than cartoons.”…
Karin Hoffman, founder of DC Works for Us and one of the attendees at Steele’s Tea Party summit, agreed with some of the RNC’s labels of the party’s donor base. “I would say that we are reactionary,” she said in an interview, adding that she wanted to return to “a time of less government.”
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