I'll let you know when it's your turn, John!

Sen. John McCain attends Sarah's Candidate Obedience Class 101

Tea Baggers arrive to target Arshinkoff

SPEAKING OF PALIN, it was just a matter of time before the Tea Party movement landed in Summit County. The National Precinct Alliance, one of several cross-breeding groups that have sprung from the current assortment of political dissenters, has joined forces with the New Summit Republicans (NSR) in a single immediate mission: the ouster of Summit County Republican Chairman Alex Arshinkoff. The NSR declared in its web site that it is "proud to partner with the National Precinct Alliance. Together, we can take back the party, put the GOP back in touch with common sense values, and start winning elections again."

We'll leave the assumption of the GOP's "common sense values" for another time. But the merging of the efforts by the NSR, which failed once before to rid the party of Arshinkoff by a 2-1 vote, and an infant national group is of central concern at the county's Republicans' front office. Arshinkoff has gotten an earlier start than usual in filling the county's 474 precincts with his loyalists, and his opponents have been busy trying to match that number. For now, the chairman is withholding his judgment until the Feb. 18 filing deadline to compare the numbers."I won't have a clear picture of the situation until I see how those numbers turn out," he says. The winners of the May 4 election will form the party's central committee that will vote later on the chairmanship.

But the national precinct group has already moved to develop a strong base at the precinct level. It boasted to the New York Times that it now has a coordinator in "nearly every state to recruit Tea Party activists ..." Although the NPA withdrew it s support from the past weekend's first National Tea Party Convention in Nashville over a disagreement on how the gate receipts would be spent, it nevertheless considers itself a major player in tapping the pool of tea baggers while their frustration is at peak levels.

Grass roots politics aren't new. Seldom does a campaign appear on the scene that doesn't claim grass roots support. It is usually built on rhetoric that provides the prospective voter an ad hoc kinship with the candidate and clearly is in the realm of polite politics. Quite often, the result is all grass and no roots, particularly when the same voters fail to see any progress and grow more cynical.

Back in the early 60s , the John Birch Society, an outrageous rightwing outfit that cast President Eisenhower as a comsymp , insisted that its success must begin at the precinct level. Its founder, Robert Welch, a New England candy manufacturer, directed his charge at Communists (the Tea Baggers' socialists of today?) and declared in his manifesto called The Blue Book that the U.S surely is in the hands of the Reds, which scared the hell out of lot of people. "We are out to get a million members truly dedicated to the things in which we believe," he wrote. That would be a major effort, he said, "but there are a million good patriots, who are also men and women of good will and good character and humane conscience in America, who are just waiting to join in the John Birch Society as fast we can can carry the story to them."

The first step he demanded, was to organize at the precinct level and infiltrate local governments - school boards, councils, whatever - with true believers.

Is history repeating itself? Inevitable.

DeLay dancing with stars in his eyes, etc.

GRUMPY ABE'S THOUGHTS FOR THE DAY:

• After watching the painful evolution of a health care reform plan, I have concluded that there may be some things on Capitol Hill that money can't buy. But offhand, I can't think of any...
• Now that a desperate audience seeking TV world has invited Tom DeLay, a scoundrel of the first rank, to appear on Dancing with the Stars, may we next see a guest appearance by Sarah Palin on Jeopardy? I would pay to see Rush Limbaugh as a pole dancer at Tony Soprano's Bada Bing. Hokier than DeLay on Dancing with the Stars? I think not.
• How many more national sponsors must Glenn Beck lose before Fox owner Rupert Murdoch, always the bottom-line guy, decide to replace him with old Frankenstein movies to lighten up the fare?
• Wednesday evening's Tea Party on the Riverfront Mall in Cuyahoga Falls will doubtless have a lot of fussn' about government and taxes in general. As I have mentioned earlier, it is billed as "non political" even though Mayor Don Robart and a legislative candidate, both Republicans, are featured speakers. But considering how much federal and state money has touched down in the city, it might be unwise to complain too much about some of the hands that are feeding the Falls. One example: a $750,000 "neighborhood stabilization" grant from Uncle Sam. Well, as Nikita Khruschchev was fond of saying, "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is negotiable."

The Movement Class

AT THE  1976 Republican convention, Bill Batchelder, the Republican state representative from Medina, Oh,  fashioned his signature wide grin as he snake-danced through the hotel corridor with a number of his conservative delegates. 

 "What are you doing?" I recall asking him. 

"It's the Movement," he exclaimed, joyously.   "The Movement!"

That was my first encounter with the word as a battle cry for conservative conservative Republicans.  And although Ronald Reagan was narrowly defeated by a sitting Republican president, Gerald Ford, he would be triumphantly back in 1980 as the godly icon of the Movement Class - a phenomenon that has again revealed itself from the ashes of last Tuesday's GOP disaster.  Op-Ed pages, talk show gurus and eager Movement politicians are now ganging up for their born-again opportunities to lead the party to righteous victory in 2012.  They'll all be at the Republican Governors Association in Miami beginning tomorrow to seek out the nearest TV camera to offer a Good Housekeeping remedy for the party's ills.  

I doubt that they will come up with a workable solution  as each wiggles  to find a special place of prominence on Olympus when  the great mentioning game begins to identify a format for what is now generally regarded as a regional party. And a racially and ethnically barren party.  Not a single African American in the Republican House and Senate delegations.  Only one Republican Jew in the U.S House, Rep. Eric Cantor of Virginia, who is somewhere to the right of  Rush Limbaugh and wants to be the minority leader.  At the same time, the president of the United States Conference  of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, has instructed  the bishops to confront Barack Obama on abortion, a conservative light switch.  

 The star attraction will be Gov. Sarah Palin, who hasn't convinced the Movement Class that controls the party that she is a political liability.  She'll be at the convention as a speaker and as a source of a number of national interviews.    But she isn't quite ready to announce her candidacy for president in 2012. In an interview with Fox News, she said she is awaiting word from God that He will open a door for her candidacy.  That should settle the commotion of where the party will go from here.  Conservatively speaking,  it's a start.