Alex Kronman

April 2, 2010

Donna Miller has been angry since Barack Obama was elected president.

She’s glad her mother, “a good Christian woman” who passed away two years earlier, wasn’t around to see it happen.

Deeply concerned about the direction she sees the country heading, she’s been active in the tea party movement protesting against government expansion and virtually every major issue the current administration has pushed forth. Miller, 61, was one of the organizers of a protest in Acacia Park in April of last year that brought together hundreds of local tea partiers.

She’s outspoken and proud of being a “die-hard Republican.” Her parents were conservative Republicans, Navy veterans and “true American patriots,” she says at the South Tejon Starbucks. Miller doesn’t believe that “patriot” applies to Obama.

Miller began kindergarten living on Liberty Island, home to the Statue of Liberty; her father was stationed there with the National Park Service.

She attended the University of Wyoming, the alma matter of Dick Cheney, of whom she is a big fan. She’s most proud of running her own small business, BDS Lifecycle, LLC, an “aerospace technical and management company.”

Her tenacity is reflected in her ideology. Miller evokes Obama’s predecessor in the White House, in that her beliefs are unwavering.

The most important issue to her is national security. “If the country isn’t safe, nothing else matters,” she says. A president must have military experience, she believes, citing Obama’s lack of military service as one of his biggest failings.

“The military has a culture all its own and you’ve got to know how to relate to military commanders,” she says. “He seems to not take national security issues seriously. He’s in a pre 9-11 mindset.”

When asked about Ronald Reagan, a Republican hero with no military service, she dives into an alternate reality. “He was smart enough to get himself smart on military affairs,” she says of Reagan. “He was a very intelligent person and he had the ability to make those critical decisions, had the leadership skills, he had the competency to serve as president and he obviously demonstrated that successfully. Obama’s thing is that it’s his way or the highway.”

The tea party movement is infamous for explaining away criticism in ways that don’t always make sense. There are many defenders of the Reagan legacy and many valid points to back them up. However, the argument that Reagan’s greatness was derived from his sheer intellect isn’t exactly a dominant narrative.

Miller’s perception of Obama’s attitude is another puzzling contradiction. She believes that “his mind runs on a single track,” and that the way he pushes his agenda is just as important as the agenda itself.

“Obama is not listening,” she says. “I was just watching him on TV talking about [healthcare] and his whole attitude is ‘I’m gonna do it, whether you like it or not.’”

The healthcare debate has gone on for over a year. Its popularity has fluctuated as the nature of the conversation has. The public option hovered for a while; the notion of “death panels” was all anyone could talk about in August. An unwillingness to engage and the refusal to recognize positives in the opposition distinguishes the tea party followers.

Miller supports the war in Iraq. “It’s either fight them over here or fight them over there,” she says.

The war in Afghanistan, she thinks, is going quite well, “especially [in] the last couple of weeks.” However, she refuses to associate Obama with that upswing. He may have made the decision to send more troops but Miller gives “the military commanders” credit. She reverts to her belief that Obama is incapable of relating to the military and that his concerns are misguided.

“He just doesn’t have American’s best interests at heart… He’s Muslim, for one thing… I think he’s a socialist, I think he wants to control everything and I just don’t think his heart is where it should be and I don’t think he is a true American patriot. He was just really into the power and the politics and his own ideology. That’s how I feel. I’m not putting him down… it’s who he is.”

Her concern about the direction of contemporary American politics is inexorably tied to the Obama agenda. Her worries about America are worries about the President’s vision of America; taking back her country means taking it away from the current administration.

Regardless of its incarnation, the tea party movement is the most attention-demanding political phenomenon of 2010. There’s a certain mystique to the group, its motives are unclear and its lack of central leadership novel in the current political landscape. The movement attracts attention not just because of people like Donna Miller but also because of omnipresent conservative commentators that stir the pot and fan the flames.

Richard Randall just finished his radio show on KVOR-AM. Each weekday morning from 8:30 to 10:00 a.m., he gives his thoughts on local and national politics, culture and events important to his largely conservative listeners.

In his studio, Randall wears his trademark KVOR trucker hat and glasses with clip on shades. He’s been on a tag-checking spree today, trying to figure out how many of the products he uses are made in America. Randall, middle aged, worries about manufacturing jobs moving oversees and, on his blog, writes that he’d be willing to pay more for “Made in the USA.”

It’s not a tea party issue but Randall is eager to point out the ideological diversity in the movement, which he describes as  a grassroots campaign made up of small groups with different emphases and concerns. Tea partiers are unified by, he says, “an absolute love of [America] and a concern for the direction it’s heading.”

The Fox News Channel flashes in the background, its explosive graphics demanding attention. Randall’s cell phone has two “R” stickers on the front, side by side. Indeed, “R-Squared” isn’t an uncommon nickname for him around the station.

On the flat panel television behind him, the closed-captioned words line the bottom of the set; Sean Hannity fills the screen. Every ten minutes or so the sound of KVOR fades in and Rush Limbaugh’s booming voice fills the room. The Richard Randall Show leads in to “Rush” every morning. Another station employee, manning the studio computers, quickly quiets the noise.

A tea partier himself, Randall emcees tea party events across Colorado Springs. The tax day tea party on April 15, 2009, in Acacia Park was just one event he hosted. In the business of talking, Randall has gotten to know the people behind the movement and their desires are not complex.

They want smaller government, fewer taxes, and they want to be heard, he says.

“They believe that money in the hands of individuals will always do a better job,” he says. “That’s a fundamental belief.”

Tea partiers are concerned citizens and their “number one” objective sets them apart. “They… want people in Washington to pay attention to them, to listen to them and to listen to their concerns,” Randall says.

Tea partiers insist that theirs is an average response to contemporary American politics, and in Colorado Springs, Randall is as much the voice of the movement as the national Coalition for a Conservative Majority or the new tea party newspaper, “The Constitutionalist Today,” published by “we the people.”

If a love of country unifies these disparate groups, first-time political activism defines the individuals that comprise them.

“They are angry and they are motivated to do something that most of them have never done before. Most of them are not the kind of people who would go protest,” notes Randall.

At a recent tea party forum in the Springs, older, white-haired people dominated the crowd of about 500 at Mr. Biggs Family Fun Center. “They tend to be a little bit older, I would say 35-plus, maybe even 45-plus and they are, you know, Judeo-Christian,” says Jarred Rego, 23, host of the Jarred Rego Show on KVOR .

Much like Colorado Springs in general, the tea party movement in Colorado Springs is largely white. The question, “Why now?” has puzzled many political theorists and led some to look at Obama’s skin color as a motivating factor. Randall, though, asserts that he doesn’t “think racism has anything to do with it.” Instead, he says, tea partiers are motivated by “the disconnect” between themselves and Washington.

Although Randall says that the question of Obama’s birth, amid accusations of him being born in Kenya, is a “pretty murky issue,” it’s “not a common denominator” among tea partiers. He contends that the tea partiers are frustrated with the stimulus and healthcare, with not seeing “tangible results for all of this money that is being spent.”

“Things [in the stimulus] where people see a tangible result; I don’t think those bother them. It’s where they don’t see a tangible result [that they’re upset],” Randall says.

Noting economic anxiety, the stimulus bill, healthcare reform and alienation from Washington politics as driving forces, Sean Paige, a Colorado Springs City Councilman, describes the tea party movement as a visceral response to the Obama presidency. It’s “instinctual, not intellectual” he says. Paige is editor of Local Liberty Online, a Colorado Springs based news blog that looks to perpetuate “limited government ideals.”

In this microcosm of “Middle America,” where a homogenous, god-fearing populous lives comfortably in a sprawling city of the American West, the tea party is thriving. As Rego put it, “even prior to the tea party movement… El Paso county was not exactly moderate Republican headquarters.” Passion is one thing, but impact is distinctly another.

“It’s a phenomenon of our times,” says Bob Loevy, professor of political science at The Colorado College, but it is a phenomenon with precedent.

“There’s always an element in American politics which is against things as they are and therefore uncomfortable in a two-party system where both parties are trying to build coalitions,” Loevy says. “My view is the tea party movement, so far highly disorganized, is just another manifestation of that phenomenon.”

Loevy sees the tea party as a classic third party movement; it’s not a “threat to established politics until they put candidates on the ballot.” In fact, Loevy points out that the tea party movement has a lot in common with Ross Perot’s presidential campaigns in the 90s.

Perot was an incredibly successful independent candidate who captured 18.9 percent of the vote in 1992. He split the Republican base and delivered the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections to Bill Clinton.

Until tea partiers put candidates up for office, Loevy says, “They’re not likely to have much of an impact.”

The full effect of the tea party movement on Colorado politics won’t be seen until the November elections but there are indications the movement is aiming for impact. At a tea party candidate debate March 9 for Republican candidates for governor and the U.S. Senate, leaders of the movement urged voters to stick together within the Republican Party. Unified, one said, can “we turn our state blood red again.”