Academic

NEWT GINGRICH ON TEA PARTY PROTESTS: VAN SUSTEREN: All right, the tea parties that they?re havin?

By Glenn Reynolds

NEWT GINGRICH ON TEA PARTY PROTESTS:

VAN SUSTEREN: All right, the tea parties that they’re having around the nation — April 15, a number of states are going to have tea parties — that just sort of a passing fancy, or is that a grass-roots movement?

GINGRICH: No, I think the tax day tea party movement, which is actually Americansolutions.com, is helping with a great deal. Over 300 cities have people signed up already. And I think these tea parties — remember, the House and the Senate will pass the first round of a really bad budget next week. They will then go home for two weeks. These tea parties come right in the middle of that congressional recess.

And my challenge is, to every member of the House and Senate, have the courage to go to a tea party in your state or your district and listen to your citizens. My prediction is there’ll be over 300,000 Americans at the tea parties, and I think it’s the beginning of a huge movement of fundamental reform not just for Washington but for places like Albany, New York, Sacramento, California, Trenton, New Jersey, all the places where the lobbyists, the politicians and the bureaucrats have been running over their citizens.

Some readers are unhappy about this — but I think that’s a glitch in the transcript, and that Gingrich is not actually trying to claim that the tea party movement is actually his Americansolutions outfit. Others think that he shouldn’t be the face of the movement. I think it’s fine if he wants to encourage it, but he’s climbing on the bandwagon — the movement was viral, grassroots, and self-organized before he even noticed it.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on March 29, 2009 (boomark / email).