Dissension in the Ranks

Over the last few weeks some unfortunate things have been happening in Central Florida, with regard to the conservative/tea party political arena.

In a number of cases campaigns have been waged, primarily via email, trying to bring down one group or another.  I will try to avoid being too specific, but in many cases the participants in these childish exchanges will be obvious. At the very least, the participants should recognize themselves and hopefully feel ashamed.

I will start with a series of emails around the Orange Country Republican Executive Committee (OCREC) Hob Nob, last week. This was publicized in advance as a fund raiser and yet there were voices shouting that this was wrong, do not attend, do not pay any money, etc. As if the OCREC should not be allowed to raise funds. I understand that issues have been raised about accountability for OCREC funds, but as the representative group of the GOP at a county level, OCREC needs to collect funds to help ensure that Republicans can be elected in 2010. There a legal and necessary steps to be taken to resolve the accounting issues, but do not take out your frustrations on the general membership, and by extension Republicans all over, by trying to torpedo their fund raising.

The second set of public name calling concerned the Tea Party Express and the organization of its last stop, here in Orlando. Here too was a call to avoid the event, published far and wide by email, also resulting in replies, and counter replies backwards and forwards. Some of this discussion was even taken to the airwaves, thereby bringing it to an even wider audience. Airing dirty linen in public does no good for our movement, unless there is proven evidence of fraud, and while much of the rhetoric was heated, I never saw accusations of out and out fraud. And while there were some issues in the organization which I will address below, the main accuser has a slightly hypocritical tone to his rants. Although he complained about commercialization of the Tea party name and events, he forget that his own radio program/web-site promotes the sales of conservative books and education materials, are they being given away? Further more most organizers of previous events have never given a full accounting of the financial results of their events, they could be losing money, they could be making money. And while the buzz is that previous events were paid for, but did not make money, they are just unconfirmed stories, no official reckoning has been given, or needs to be. But then do not expect more from others when someone else takes up the torch.   Finally,  although the accuser was encouraging people not to attend, the candidate for which he is campaign manager did have a booth at the event. Playing both sides of the fence there are we?
On the organization side, there had been much to-do about the fact that the costs of the event were being covered by the selling of booth space, and space in a printed program. However, the organizer had been very up front in stating that this was not a charitable event and that any profit would indeed accrue to his own organization. We are indeed a capitalist society, at least for as long as 0bama will allow, so we should not complain about this. On the other side, with costs for services or products comes an expectation of value. it seems that the event may have fallen down in that respect. Although I was on a business trip and only arrived midway through the event, I heard a number of disquieting problems and issues from a number of people that I talked to after my late arrival.
I did address some of these issues directly with the organizer (not via blast emails!) and he has provided his answers in a blog on his own web-site. Thus the public can make their own decision about the veracity of these replies. The answers postulated all seem reasonable, my only concern is that sometimes the description of the issue differs slightly from what I heard at the event, or afterwards, and this leaves loose ends for the future.

I was disappointed at the washing of dirty linen in public that the above mentioned exchanges brought about, and yet, in order to address these problems in our movement, I have had to resort to some washing of my own. For that I apologize to my readers, but I feel that I could not discuss the overall problems without some specificity. I believe that we need to overcome these growing pains by moving into a more professional approach in everything that we do. The good news is that just before the Tea Party Express event, a Summit was held in Orlando of conservative activist groups from all over Florida. By communicating at a leadership level I am sure that we can channel all the good energy that is being generated throughout the many different groups and translate that energy into support for good solid conservative candidates. A by-product of our leadership sharing will no doubt be better and more transparent processes for organization of our grass roots events in the future.