In mid-January a New York Times story, In Power Push, Movement Sees Base in G.O.P. , reported on the Tea Party Patriots' game plan to take over the Republican party from beneath. The story quoted a Tea Party activist new to the political scene, stay-at-home mom Anastasia Przybylski:
"...in a perennial battleground district outside Philadelphia, Tea Party activists are trying to strip the local committee of its influence in choosing the Republican nominee...Przybylski's partner in these Tea Party efforts has been good friend (and fellow local mother) Mariann Davies. According to PhillyBurbs.com's Gary Weckselblatt,
“We kind of changed the rules,” said Anastasia Przybylski, one of the organizers... who describes herself as “just a stay-at-home mom” who became agitated about the federal stimulus package."
"a Doylestown mother of three young children...Przybylski and good friend Mariann Davies began the Kitchen Table Patriots, a conservative group concerned with America's ballooning national debt. They organized the Washington Crossing [Bucks County PA] Tea Party, and to show how new to the game they were, they began by calling it a "pork roast and tea party," said Przybylski, who developed the group's Web site, thekitchentablepatriots.com, though she could "barely cut and paste before I started.""...to show how new to the game they were..."
OK, how new to the game were they?
Googling reveals that Przybylski's friend and co-organizer Mariann Davies, an attorney, is vice chair of the anti-illegal-immigrant front group "You Don't Speak for Me!", one of three such groups ("Choose Black America" and "Coalition for the Future American Worker" being the other two) set up by the largely Scaife-funded group Federation for American Immigration Reform.
And, though less surprisingly, the website of the Tea Party group Davies and Przybylski founded, the Kitchen Table Patriots, currently promotes a "Citizen Lobby Training" conducted by the (also-Scaife-funded) conservative advocacy group FreedomWorks.
What is it about moms, anyway? What does Frank Luntz say about moms?
4 comments:
Maybe moms have automatic credibility because they are half of an equation, the other half of which is apple pie.
Think of MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), Cindy Sheehan (Gold Star Moms), MITI (Moms In Touch International), etc.
Yes, the apple pie certainly helps. (Yummm!)
Two other reasons as well, I think.
One is "peer influence" - if an influential mom thinks Y, then her fellow moms (almost half the human race) are inclined to do likewise.
And the second is peer influence within a specific cultural tribe. If your cultural tribe particularly values motherhood, and these "influentials" are self-identifying as mothers (rather than, say, attorneys, PR practioners, etc) then that sends the further msg that they're of your tribe, and thus particularly worth aligning your views with.
(or so I think)
I think it's pretty clear now that many TPPs are in it just to elect Republicans to office at the mid-terms. This is not a independent or third-party effort. It's the right-wing version of Move-On. It'll be interesting to see how they do.
On rumination, it does sometimes seem like poor old NCFocus got used as the antiregulationists' playbook.
From 2004: "The Union needs a mom ("We wanted a term that specifically excluded any concept of ownership, but instead of stewardship") at the helm. We had one, once; we miss her."(link)
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