Tea Party has trouble coalescing around one candidate

By Alan Gomez, USA TODAY Updated 4m ago

WASHINGTON – Getting the country's purposefully decentralized Tea Party movement to coalesce around one GOP presidential candidate was already a difficult proposition.

Now with Herman Cain out of the race, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann dropping out after her sixth-place finish in Tuesday's Iowa caucuses and Texas Gov. Rick Perry's fifth-place finish, Tea Party members are quickly losing the candidates they have rallied around over the past year.

"I'm just disappointed, honestly," Dolores Stottlemyer, president of the Apple Valley (Va.) Tea Party, said Wednesday.

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As Tea Party officials sorted out the fallout from Iowa, they spent more time the next day worrying about the remaining candidates than they did trying to figure out who would be their ideal candidate.

Toby Marie Walker, a human resources consultant who founded the Waco (Texas) Tea Party, was upset to see former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum fare so well in Iowa, where he lost to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney by only eight votes. She said that Santorum would appeal to some socially conservative voters but that he violated the core tenet of the Tea Party — fiscal responsibility — during his tenure in the Senate.

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Read all On Politics posts "I think (his supporters) have fiscal blinders on," Walker said. "They're thinking, 'Everything's fine because we're a family and we go to church.' Meanwhile you're mortgaging your house to the hilt. You can be a nice guy, but we have to have a fiscal hawk."

Stottlemyer, who works in a grocery store in Winchester, Va., said she's depressed to see so many people buy into the line that Romney is the only candidate capable of beating President Obama. She said that's led to many people who despise the health care plan Romney signed into law as governor and his other shortcomings begrudgingly supporting him.

"I've maybe talked to two people in the last five months that like Romney," she said. "What does that tell you?"

Cyndi Diercks, a tree nursery owner and founder of the Tea Party of the Quad Cities, said she was upset to see so many people give up on Texas Rep. Ron Paul because of concerns that he can't win in November.

As she caucused in Princeton, Iowa, Diercks said people who spoke for Romney and former House speaker Newt Gringrich expressed support for Paul, but encouraged people to vote for their candidate because they were more electable. "I almost got the opinion that they would vote for anybody, even for the devil, as long as he could beat Obama," she said.

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips said he was sad to see Bachmann drop out, and said good things about Perry's credentials. But he said the winnowing process needed to happen so that the fractured Tea Party could coalesce around one candidate to ensure that a Republican who carries the Tea Party message ends up facing Obama.

"God bless them, they're good people," he said. "But for whatever reason their campaigns did not take off."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/politic...tes/52380968/1