Tea Party Express Rolls Into Columbia

Tea Party members and supporters descended on a Cayce parking lot Friday evening to welcome the Tea Party Express as its traveling road show of performers, activists and presidential candidates made its way to the Midlands.

About 100 people showed up outside the Hard Knox Grill to rally and listen to a range of speakers that included recently announced GOP presidential candidate Buddy Roemer, and Elizabeth Santorum, the 20-year-old daughter of candidate Rick Santorum, who was unable to make the trip. 

Also on the program at the event, hosted by the Columbia Tea Party: state Attorney General Alan Wilson, Saturday Night Live cast member Victoria Jackson, and Nevada politician Sharron Angle, who stirred controversy and made headlines in 2010 during her unsuccessful race against Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

The event also featured speakers from a handful of advocacy groups, including the S.C. Policy Council and Americans for Prosperity, a conservative activist organization founded and funded by the Koch brothers -- billionaire industrialists loathed by progressives and widely considered to be the nation's largest underwriters of right-wing political causes.

The Midlands tour stop was just the latest leg of a 30-city tour themed "Reclaiming America." Earlier in the day, , where  presidential candidate Herman Cain and Gov. Nikki Haley took top billing. 

The tour continues today in Bluffton, in Beaufort County, and will conclude on Monday, Sept. 12 in Tampa, Fla., where the Tea Party Express will hold a Republican presidential debate on CNN.

While Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul supporters were the most visible at the event, hoisting official campaign signs along with their own handmade placards, it was apparent that the affections of tea partiers remain wide open. You would have been hard-pressed to find a Mitt Romney supporter, and state Attorney General Alan Wilson likely was the sole supporter of the moderate and mild-mannered Jon Huntsman, whom he recently endorsed. Otherwise, Tea Party votes, it appears, remain up for grabs. 

"That may be a problem," said a man from Aiken who declined to give his name. "I kinda like Perry. But we've got (Rick) Santorum people here, Bachmann people, Perry people. Most of them candidates are all saying the same things, so it may just may come down to a matter of style. 

"We're all conservatives, constitutional conservatives, but we're not all Republican or Libertarian," he added. "We're not lock-step, like a real political party. Hell, you could probably find a few conservative Democrats here. Until the primaries start and we start seeing who might be able to actually boot Obama out, there's no telling what's going to happen.

"Right now, we're just dating," the man added with a laugh. "We'll see who we want to go steady with sometime early next year."

"Right now my favorite is Herman Cain," said Bob Root, a retiree from Shady Grove, Fla., who has been following the caravan and hearing from candidates at various stops along the way.

Being around his fellow tea partiers for awhile now, Root said, "I think a lot of the Tea Party are not looking for Romney. I think a lot of the candidates have a bit of a negative history. They're just career politicians." Unlike Cain, a successful business executive who has run for office, but never held one.

While tea partiers may not be ready to coalesce around one candidate, they seemed generally as one on other key issues -- such as unionization, and tax and economic policy -- that have managed to hold together a loose confederation of voters with no central control. 

The Tea Party may not be a bonafide political party, bit it is a tribe, and one that seems intent on continuing its momentum into 2012 and beyond. Perhaps the best received lines of the whole evening came from Sharron Angle of Nevada. 

"Sen. John McCain in the Wall Street Journal, he said Sharron Angle and those Tea Party Hobbits need to go back to their holes in Middle Earth," Angle said. "Well, bless his heart, he needs to read to the end of the story. The Hobbits are the heroes. We win!

"And we're also sending a message to [Democratic Calif. Rep.] Maxine Waters," Angle added. "She told us that the Tea Party could go to hell. Well, we have no interest in visiting her district. We're on our way to Tampa Bay for a presidential debate -- and then we're on our way to Washington, D.C."