Theresa Dickerson stood among nearly 1,000 Tea Party protesters on April 15 with a common complaint.
She was tired of another misconception in the media about
the movement she had heard earlier in the day. Dickerson, of Middleville, said
a commentator was chastising Tea Partiers for not wanting any taxes. "We
don't want to abolish all taxes," Dickerson said. "We want to cut out all the
waste and all the favoritism that goes on." Thousands
of Tea Party activists came out on April 15 all across Michigan. Dickerson said
she thinks she is typical of the Tea Party movement. She
understands a third party is not "viable." She is disillusioned by the GOP but has not abandoned it.
She used to give money to the state and national GOP, but stopped doing that in
2004 because "I was tired of the party putting their money behind weak
candidates." Now, she does her own research and gives directly to
candidates and the Tea Party organizations she supports. "I
still consider myself a Republican," Dickerson said. "But that's not the first
thing I am anymore." Dickerson
said she is a patriot first, then a conservative and then a Republican. And
she researches who she will vote for. She
says a central theme of the Tea Party movement is self-education on political
candidates. "A
great deal (of this) is know who you are putting in office," she said. "That is
how we got here." "The
thing I look for is: Who will do the least amount of damage to the Bill of
Rights and Constitution, and who is going to grow government the least?" Deborah
Shreve-Cowalcyk of Hudsonville said the crowd of 1,000 was just 'the tip' of a
growing movement that is angered by how it is described in the media and by
politicians who don't listen. "This
is a fraction of what the movement is," Shreve-Cowalcyk said. "There are a lot
of people who are sick of this. ... This country is not what the Founding
Fathers envisioned." "It's
not the Tea Party anymore. It's the pissed off party." Earlier
in the day, about 900 people showed up in a mall parking lot in Hudsonville. Hillsdale
College student T. Elliot Gaiser was one of the event's speakers. Gaiser said the Tea Party
movement has become unprecedented in terms of anything he's studied involving a
conservative movement. "The
Reagan Revolution didn't have anything like this," Gaiser said after speaking.
"The Contract With America didn't have anything like this. People standing in a
parking lot at noon to have their voices heard on a hot day like this." The original version of this story was posted online on April 16, 2010.
Michigan Capitol Confidential is the news source produced by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. Michigan Capitol Confidential reports with a free-market news perspective.