Rogues of K Street: Confessions of a Tea Party Consultant
Playboy magazine has a nice writeup by an anonymous K-Street consultant on the inner-workings and underpinnings of the Tea Party movement. Some of the author’s claims (pasted from a HuffPo writeup on the same story):
# Tea Party strategists have “quietly acquired Service Employees International Union shirts to wear at Tea Party rallies,” which he or she describes as the equivalent of “handing out TSA uniforms in Kabul.”
# Sarah Palin isn’t the leader of the movement. Big Government’s Andrew Breitbart is. “Breitbart is one of them, except smarter, better connected and angrier; compared with him, Palin is Las Vegas dinner theater. That’s why he is loved by Tea Partyers in a way Palin can never hope to be loved.”
# Strategists deliberately try to stir up rage among average Americans, calculating that it’s much easier to push a political movement if it’s deeply frightened than if it’s entirely hopeful. “We’re playing to the reptilian brain rather than the logic centers, so we look for key words and images to leverage the intense rage and anxiety of white working-class conservatives,” the consultant writes. “In other words, I talk to the same part of your brain that causes road rage.”