Tea Party Groups Loosely Connected, Relish Outsider Role, Analysis Finds

The tea party has been effective at grabbing headlines, showcasing rising conservative stars, putting fear into incumbents of both parties, and generally throwing a wrench into the established political machine.

But the grassroots movement has been less adroit at presenting a unified front, with its disjointed membership happy to play the role of outsider and spoiler, according to an analysis by The Washington Post.

The review concludes that the tea party is a "disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process."

Many members say that's the way they like it. They're happy to stay on the periphery of politics, lobbing rhetorical grenades and mugging for the media spotlight but never getting close enough to ever be called insiders.

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that prominent Republicans, like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, are working hard to ingratiate themselves into the tea party, hoping to lift their presidential chances in 2012. Those establishment politicians may find a cool reception among the grass-roots faithful.

"We're not wanting to be a third party," Matt Ney, founder of a tea party group near Houston, told the newspaper. "We're not wanting to endorse individual candidates ever. What we're trying to do is be activists by pushing a conservative idea."

According to the Post:

Seventy percent of the grass-roots groups said they have not participated in any political campaigning this year. As a whole, they have no official candidate slates, have not rallied behind any particular national leader, have little money on hand, and remain ambivalent about their goals and the political process in general.

The Post verified 647 individual tea party groups nationwide (though the movement claims thousands more) and found that many of those feel no particular connection to the national organizations that claim them. The bigger groups -- including Tea Party Patriots, FreedomWorks and Tea Party Express -- are headed by "longtime political players" who have used their insider knowledge to elect a number of conservative candidates.

Some of the smaller groups have memberships as small as one or two people, the Post found.

Most members said economic issues and distrust of government are what motivated them to participate, but they are less clear when asked about specifics. Fewer than half the groups said they were concerned about "spending and limiting the size of government," the Post said. And social issues, such as abortion and same-sex marriage, "did not register as concerns."

"Some of the groups want to take on prayer in school. Some of them want to take on voter education. Some want to be endorsing candidates," Joe Lisante, an Ohio tea party leader, told the newspaper. "But there is no particular person, at least in the state of Ohio, who is the president of the tea party; it just doesn't exist. That's a disadvantage for us because we can't move quickly on things. We can't always agree."

A majority of respondents said they were opposed to Barack Obama's policies. And 11 percent said that the president's race, religion or ethnic background was either a "very important" or "somewhat important" factor in the support their group has received, according to the analysis.

Read the complete Post report here.