Has The Tea Party Movement Cooled?

Walter Hudson

The Minneapolis Post interviews some Tea Party activists: "Walter Hudson, an activist with the North Star Tea Party Patriots, however, begs to differ [that opposing Obamacare doesn't have the resonance that it once had among the center-right] — in a way. 'I couldn’t disagree more with the assessment that Obamacare has disappeared as an issue,' he said. 'On the contrary, the Supreme Court decision ruling framed the debate in starker terms than ever before. It is no longer just about health care but the capacity of the federal government to mandate anything imaginable....through taxation.' Still, Hudson agrees that the strength of the Tea Party has been 'blunted.'"

Mr. Hudson, who is a libertarian-conservative, discusses divisions within the Tea Party movement between libertarians and social conservatives: "Objectivists apparently rub some fundamentalist Christians the wrong way, which has led to the concern among the Paul crowd about the direction the Tea Party is headed. The Tea Party’s Hudson disputes this 'takeover business.' 'Checking social issues at the door does not preclude picking them up on your way out,' Hudson said, 'and certainly doesn’t preclude supporting a candidate who shares your views. What the Paulites [Ron Paul supporters] saw was interest among Tea Partiers in candidates like Rick Santorum and Michele Bachmann. 'They took this to mean that the Tea Party had been ‘taken over’ by social conservatives. It has not,' he said. 'There are simply social conservatives in the mix, working together with libertarians and others on the economic and constitutional issues they all agree on.'"