Tea Party mad at Republicans, too
FRESNO — Organizers called it the Real Resistance Conference. But the 140 Tea Party-organized activists who gathered in a hotel by the Fresno airport this weekend have been as far from the anti-President Trump resistance as you can get.
Yet their targets — other than the “cultural Marxists” (i.e., Democrats) in the Legislature — were largely Republicans who they are convinced have betrayed them.
Representing regions all over California, these resisters hissed every mention of Republican Assembly Leader Chad Mayes, R-Yucca Valley (San Bernardino County), and other members of what they call the “Swamp Eight” — the eight GOP legislators who supported California’s climatechange legislation last month. Several promised to back a primary challenge against Mayes.
The Tea Party types are mad at Senate Republicans in Washington — particularly Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — for fumbling the chance to repeal and replace former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, even though Republicans hold all three branches of
“He’s an alpha male, and people love that.” John “Woody” Woodrum, board member of the Tea Party California Caucus, about President Trump
government.
They called — as they have in the past — for taking over the California Republican Party, which they said is virtually impotent in statewide politics and is controlled by big-money interests that don’t represent them.
And they’re fuming at every state legislator who supported a gasoline tax bill last month that would raise $5.2 billion annually to fix California’s crumbling transportation systems over the next decade.
Yet nobody here was criticizing President Trump.
Instead, Trump was given a place of honor. A cardboard cutout of the president, adorned with a red “Make America Great Again” scarf, stood on the podium, watching over all the speakers who addressed the two-day conference, which ended Saturday.
“President Trump is a bigger-than-life character,” said John “Woody” Woodrum, a San Diego resident who is a board member of the Tea Party California Caucus, which organized the gathering.
Other officeholders fit into what Woodrum defines in his own etymology of the word “politics”: “Poli-, which means many,” Woodrum said, “and ‘tics,’ which are those little, blood-sucking insects.
“And this is one of the things that people have come to realize: That we’ve got a lot of these blood-sucking insects out there that are not doing what they said they would do,” Woodrum said. “They want somebody in there who is going to make things happen.”
Trump “has decades of making things happen. They didn’t care if he had a long history of political niceness or political correctness,” Woodrum said. “People are still enamored of him . ... He’s an alpha male, and people love that.”
Trump remains popular with this slice of the conservative world because, even though his first few months in office have produced no significant legislation, they feel that he at least tried to deliver what he has promised.
They don’t consider the nation’s tense nuclear standoff with North Korea to be inflamed by Trump tweets or the president’s pledge to respond with “fury and fire.” Instead, they see that as him standing up for America in a way that former presidents like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama didn’t when confronted by North Korean aggression.
The conference-goers don’t see Trump as being relatively inactive in repealing the health care law. They blame that on McConnell.
“You have a Senate that’s led by this traitor McConnell. That’s who to blame,” said Keith Lopez, a Fresno delivery driver. “As for Trump, he’s doing what he said he would do.”
The attendees, predominantly white and middle-aged, did not appear to be kin of the self-described “alt-right” nationalist forces who were at the center of a riot Saturday in Charlottesville, Va. Other than their grievances with the status quo, they were mostly united by things like their fealty to the Second Amendment. When Tim Donnelly, a former assemblyman and onetime California GOP gubernatorial candidate, asked, “Anybody here own an AR-15 (rifle)?” a dozen hands were raised.
“I envision a California where not only is every lawabiding noncriminal allowed to carry a firearm but required (to),” Donnelly said, to cheers.
“A lot of these people are ordinary Californians who feel marginalized and forgotten,” Assemblyman Travis Allen, R-Huntington Beach (Orange County), a candidate for governor, said before addressing the group Saturday. “There’s a silent supermajority in this state that rejects the high-taxand-spend policies of the (Gov.) Jerry Brown establishment that runs California.”
While this gathering may have been modest in size, both major Republican candidates running for governor — Allen and San Diego County venture capitalist John Cox — addressed the conference Saturday. Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Elk Grove (Sacramento County), who was one of first — and few —sitting politicans embraced by the Tea Party since its inception, was Friday’s keynote speaker.
McClintock delivered tough love, acknowledging that while “the polls look bad,” for Trump they “don’t reflect disagreement with the direction the president is trying to move our country. It reflects a belief that we’re not getting there.”
While the “left is energized and organized,” McClintock said, “let’s face it, our side has spent the last 10 months either celebrating the 2016 election or squabbling amongst ourselves.
“Every one of you has a right to resent a dysfunctional Senate that has chosen not to reform its cloture rules, (which are) handing control of the Senate over to (Senate Minority Leader Chuck) Schumer,” D-N.Y., McClintock said.
“But these are not reasons to give up and go home,” McClintock said. “You have got to make this majority work.”
But the challenge will be how to harness all of this shake-a-fist outrage into an effective, focused political force — particularly since it does not have a deep-pocketed donor backing it in California. Many attending the weekend conference were working- or middleclass Californians living in rural or suburban areas.
Saturday’s sessions focused on grassroots organizing strategy and were largely closed to the media. But Randall Jordan, chair of the Tea Party California Caucus, encouraged his fellow Tea Party members to follow what he did and get elected to a local state Republican Party board to change it from the inside. Reaction to that suggestion was mixed and Jordan knows the reason why.
“I know people always say we need to abandon the Republican Party,” Jordan said. “I know how frustrated we all are. I know how terrible that our Republican Party is here, and it is. It’s a nightmare in California. It’s a good ol’ boys club. It’s run by big money.”
Mike Lelieur, a Santa Cruz resident who just left the GOP, said, “I didn’t leave my party. It left me.” Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@ sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli