Grassroots, Guns and Freedom: Tea Party Express Bus Rolls Into Nevada

RENO, Nev. -- "Freedom" was easy to spot in Reno Monday morning. That's the name of the 700-pound, 150-foot-tall bald eagle hot air balloon that towered above the Atlantis Casino Resort parking lot and the opening rally for the Tea Party Express's national bus tour.

But even as Freedom hovered, Senate candidate Sharron Angle was absent from the rally of roughly 1,500 of her local supporters. Calls to the Angle campaign were not returned, but according to the Associated Press, her absence was due to federal election laws that bar coordination between candidates and the independent groups that support them.

Thanks largely to small, individual donors, Angle has been shattering fundraising records; she raked in $14 million in the third quarter alone. And since April 2010, the former Nevada state assemblywoman has received more than a half-million dollars from the Tea Party Express, which is in turn funded by the Sacramento-based Our Country Deserves Better political action committee.

Among the cottage industry of small businesses that trail the bus tour, the origin of all this political money is not a primary concern. Some business owners, like Jason Umbower of Tea Party Gifts, are simply focused on selling their wares. Umbower drove to Reno from his home near Dallas for the start of the tour, but was disappointed by what he felt was a small turnout.

"We need big crowds to make this work," he said. Still, his custom products give him confidence business will pick up as the 15-day, 30-city tour continues. "Where else can you find a hat that says 'infidel' in Arabic?" he asked.

For Maury Petrehn, the bus tour provides a more secure arrangement. The Tea Party Express hired the veteran hot air balloonist to truck his monumental bird balloon 1,700 miles from his home in Olathe, Kans., to rallies in Reno and Las Vegas. The political organization paid his travel expenses, plus a "several thousand dollar fee," he said.

Even though Freedom was bought by political money, Petrehn said that neither he nor his balloon is politically engaged. "The eagle is not a Republican or a Democrat."

The same political neutrality cannot be applied to the tour's organizers. Petrehn's Tea Party Express liaison is a woman named Tiffiny, whose last name he could not recall. According to the Our Country Deserves Better staff page, Director of Field Operations Tiffiny Ruegner is the only Tiffiny on staff. Ruegner's bio links to her blog, The Right Mixx, where the most recent post compared quotes by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels with an ostensibly unrelated commencement speech by Barack Obama.

In a growing trend of savvy self-awareness, some Tea Party supporters and candidates have been distancing themselves from this sort of charged rhetoric. Compared to Tea Party events from a year ago, anger seems to be a waning form of political expression.

One Reno-based grassroots group, Anger Action Is Brewing even scrapping anger from its name.

"There are only two human emotions that lead to action-anger and fear," said the group's founder, Debbie Landis. "We were angry, but we intended to use it positively as a motivating factor," she said.

On Monday, Landis' group raised money by raffling off some guns (along with a year's supply of Starbucks coffee). Landis is originally from Maryland and said that while guns still make her nervous, fellow Nevadans assured her they were appropriate Western prizes. Indeed, of the guns up for grabs -- a scoped hunting rifle, two Glock 9mm handguns and a 12-gauge shotgun -- some were donated by Nevada's Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki.

Landis is sensitive to the volatile combination of guns, anger and politics. "There was a guy at one Tea Party selling ammunition, and that struck me as a little extreme," she said.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was the final speaker in Reno, and her speech was consistently upbeat and often positive. By stringing together dozens of political catch phrases -- many of which she invented during her meteoric rise to celebrity -- Palin delivered 20 minutes of nearly unbroken sloganeering.

"You didn't retreat, you reloaded," she told the cheering crowd. "Now you get to take the ballots by storm with a smile on your face."

When she turned her focus on the national "lamestream media," the crowd pivoted and booed at the press pool of photographers and cameramen covering the event for the national media.

To the Obama administration, she said, "You shook our economy, but you cannot shake America herself."



It was all a bit much for David Chessik. Chessik stood near the back of the crowd next to a table piled with rolls of novelty toilet paper printed with the faces of public figures complicit in the market crash and ensuing bailouts of late 2008 and early 2009. ("Bankster Buddy Bush" is just above "King Shifty Paulson, The Self-Dealing Jackass.") The bipartisan protest toilet paper was arguably the least partisan merchandise for sale at the rally.

Chessik said that the well-funded rallies show how the GOP is trying to co-opt what is essentially a grassroots movement. The Tea Party will endure with the right leader, Chessik said. "And Sarah Palin is not it."

Meanwhile, Petrehn was getting ready to pack up his soaring eagle for the Vegas rally. He has traveled the world wowing people of all ages with his hot air balloons and seemed much more excited by the physics of his propane tanks than the political theater surrounding him.

"I'm not pro or con," Petrehn said of the Tea Party. As people waved signs and bought bumper stickers and shouted "Amen" for low taxes, Petrehn reminded me that the hot air balloon is man's original flying machine, a device invented more than a hundred years before Orville and Wilbur Wright did anything noteworthy.

"It's very simple," he said, looking up into Freedom's hollow core. "Just a wicker basket and a bag of hot air."