http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2010/feb/07/tea-party-meeting-looking-forge-full-fledged-movem/

NASHVILLE — Yes, there were the handful of Revolutionary War re-enactors with their powdered wigs and tri-corner hats. And the guy with the T-shirt proclaiming himself a proud member of the “Tennessee MOB” — a poke at politicians who dismissed tea partiers as an “angry mob.” And one speaker did insist that Jesus’ birth was better documented than President Barack Obama’s.

But at the inaugural National Tea Party Convention here this weekend, gone were the placards protesters had carried last year with Obama’s face wearing a Hitler mustache, or superimposed on the Joker. Gone, really, were any placards, unless you count the poster of Sarah Palin in her signature red jacket that someone had hung from one of the wrought iron balconies of the Opryland Hotel and Convention Center.

Organizers said that anyone who had shown up “looking too crazy” would have been tossed out. They had a goal that it turned out pretty much everyone here shared: to turn the Tea Party into a serious political force, rather than the anger-filled, fringe group they say they have been branded as.

“The movement is maturing,” said Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, the social networking site that sponsored the convention. “The rallies were good for last year, because that’s what we could do last year. This year we have to change things. We have got to win.”

The goal is a electing a conservative Congress in 2010 and a conservative president in 2012. To that end, organizers announced the formation of a political action committee they say could steer $10 million to conservative challengers this year.

And the convention tried to channel anger into what Phillips called “Electioneering 101.” “What we want people to do is to leave here connected with other activists, so they can recruit good candidates, get candidates exposed to the voters, and get voters to the polls,” he said. “If we just go out and hold signs and protest, that’s not going to win the election.”

But the convention and its neat PowerPoint presentations aside, the movement that began a year ago as protests against government bailouts and health care legislation appeared this weekend to be still inchoate, diverse and almost defiantly leaderless.

Tea Party Nation said it had invited the chairmen of the Republican and Democratic National Committees to speak with delegates in town-hall-style sessions. Tea partiers argue that Republicans are just as complicit as Democrats in the expansion of Big Government, so perhaps neither would have felt welcome.

But organizers said they never heard back from the Democratic National Committee, and while the Republican chairman, Michael Steele, expressed interest, he later declined, citing “scheduling issues,” which Phillips called “really regrettable.”

“Are they scared of you?” asked a reporter from French radio, one of several foreign journalists covering the convention.

“They should be,” Phillips said.

Among those represented here were some old conservative players, like Young Americans for Freedom and Judicial Watch. But the convention was bleeding sponsors and participants right up to its opening day because of accusations from other Tea Party groups that Tea Party Nation, which is unapologetically for-profit, was profiteering. Tea Party Patriots, another social networking site with ties to FreedomWorks, the Washington advocacy powerhouse led by Dick Armey, the former Republican House leader, suggested to its members that the ticket price was too high: $549, or $349 to see only Palin, the keynote speaker Saturday night.

Phillips refused to say how much Palin was being paid, saying she had made them sign a confidentiality agreement. Reports were that her fee was $100,000.

In the end, he said, the convention would just break even: “I keep telling people my profit’s going to be in the high two figures.”

THE UNCONVENTION

Apart from a guy wearing the shirt fashioned from an American flag, this did not have the confetti and balloon-drop feel of the typical party convention. It could have been an annual gathering of dentists or teachers (next door in the conventions wing at the Opryland, a small planet of a hotel, was Blissdom, a confab of female bloggers).

Delegates with name tags on lanyards browsed at campaign booths - one set up for Judge Roy Moore, last in the national headlines for his fight to keep a monument of the Ten Commandments outside his courthouse, now running for Alabama governor. There were vendors selling T-shirts, sterling silver tea bag pendants, and Tea Party coffee and tea (special convention price: $8 a bag).

There were no fiery speeches. The 600 people who had come from as far as Hawaii sat in neat rows in banquet rooms, listening to panel discussions about how to grow the movement and raising their hands politely to speak.

“This is a real working convention, there was nothing around tea bags and signs,” said Mark Skoda, the leader of the Memphis tea party, who had been chosen, with his radio voice and imposing fagade, to deal with the news media, which the Tea Party movement says has been less than friendly.

Many of the sessions emphasized the importance of new technologies. Despite their views, Tea Party activists do often cite Obama’s campaign as a model for how it built a fortune from small donations and used social networking.

But the crowd here was largely middle aged and upward, and technology may not come as easily as it did to the children, by comparison, who powered Obama’s campaign. A session on “collaboration in the cloud-applied technology” got hung up on basics like how to do an effective Google search, buy a Web domain, or send mass e-mail.

Still, what delegates may lack in political savvy, they make up for in energy.

At a panel discussion titled “Defeating Liberalism via the Primary Process,” the room erupted in a standing ovation when Barbee Kinnison, a delegate from Nevada, stood up and declared her intention to unite Tea Party groups behind a candidate to defeat Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader.

As the session ended a few moments later, people charged toward her to exchange cell phone numbers and pledges of support. “You need to come to California and help us defeat Nancy Pelosi,” one woman said.

THE BROWN ‘EARTHQUAKE’

Sen. Scott Brown, the newly sworn-in Republican from Massachusetts, was not here, but his presence was everywhere, his victory cited as an example of how the Tea Party could turn anger into power.

Skoda said the energy at the march on Washington in September excited him.

“Then nothing happened,” he said. “A million and a half people, and the president sort of ignored us. That’s when people realized we had to do more.”

They got close, he said, with the special congressional election in New York’s 23rd District, where a third-party conservative drove a moderate Republican from the race, then lost to a Democrat by a few thousand votes.

But then came what he called Brown’s “earthquake,” winning a seat that had been held by a Kennedy for nearly half a century.

“I think people recognized at that moment, ‘Gosh, all this resulted in somebody being elected and changing the environment for the entire Obama agenda,”’ he said. “We did it without pejoratives, we did it without name-calling, we did it without all the absurdity that one would suggest is the traditional anger of the moment. We grew up.”

A FAMILY AFFAIR

The enthusiasm, apparently, could be catching.

Susan and Gil Harper from Cushing, Maine — she a lawyer who telecommutes to New York, he a furniture maker — said they had limited their political involvement to voting. But Harper said the bank bailout outraged them, and pushed him to his first Tea Party rally.

By Christmas, he told his wife that what he wanted was a ticket to the Tea Party Convention.

When she gave it to him, she said she would go along, but only incognito, wearing a hat and sunglasses.

“Because of Nancy Pelosi calling people who believe in the Tea Party movement Nazis,” she explained. “My grandfather’s family, as Polish Jews, escaped Nazism. To call us Nazis is an abomination.”

By Friday night, her head was uncovered, her eyes making direct, and determined, contact.

“I think she’s come out,” Harper said.

She smiled back. “I’m not wearing a hat anymore.”