A Cincinna-Tea Party

Here in Cincy the buzz today is about Howard Wilkinson's Enquirer article on the local Cincinnati Tea Party trying to rebuild southwest Ohio's GOP from the ground up.

They are doing it here by the hundreds by filing as candidates in the May 4 primary election for the office of precinct executive, the lowest rung of the political party structure.

"It's the place where you can have the most impact,'' said Mike Wilson, the founder of the Cincinnati Tea Party. "It's one thing to talk to the party leaders about change. It's another thing to actually be the party leadership and make the change from within."

It is a strategy that has worked elsewhere - Tea Party activists essentially took over the Nevada Republican Party earlier this month; and, in Florida, they were successful in forcing out a state party chairman who was seen as too centrist.

A Tea Party takeover of a county party organization would, no doubt, result in a far more conservative party organization that would likely field candidates who are hard-liners on taxes and spending.

Wilson and other Tea Party leaders - working with a loose affiliation of conservative groups like Ohio Liberty Council and the Cincinnati 9/12 project - have traveled around Southwest Ohio over the past few months holding meetings where they give Tea Party activists a PowerPoint crash course on how to run for precinct executives.

Leaders of the suburban county Republican Parties agree they've noticed a surge of interest from those with Tea Party affiliations.

Wilson said he alone has talked to at least 5,000 people over the past few months; and said he knows of at least 300 Tea Party activists who plan to run for precinct executive positions in southwest Ohio. The number is likely to grow considerably before the Feb. 18 candidate filing deadline, he said.

"We're asking people to run, regardless of which party they choose,'' Wilson said. "Both parties need reforming."

But Wilson and other Tea Party organizers concede that the vast majority of them will run as Republicans, just because that is the party that most closely represents their anti-tax, anti-government spending philosophy.

For those of you not in Cincy, I can tell you that Southwest Ohio is the battleground part of this battleground state.  Cincy itself has a decently high African-American urban population in the city and not one but four universities:  Xavier, U of C, Cincinnati State and Miami of Ohio.  It has an African-American Mayor in Mark Mallory and a pretty decent cultural core:  the Taft Museum of Art, the Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the Cincy Zoo, and the Classical Music Hall of Fame is here too.

And all that barely balances out the blood red, heavily pro-life Catholic suburbs in places like West Chester and Dayton.  Democrat Steve Dreihaus is Cincy's rep, but he's a Blue Dog through and through, and surrounding him are Republicans like Mean Jean Schmidt and John "Orange Julius" Boehner.

If there a place where the Teabaggers can do a lot of local damage, it's Cincinnati.  After all, look what they did in Dayton.

These guys plan to push out any semblance of moderation or bipartisan cooperation in Cincy.  They're not here to reform ther government, they're here to dismantle it, to prove it doesn't work to voters by making sure it's not allowed to do anything but cut taxes and create larger budget holes that will have to be filled with the corpses of programs meant to help the least among us, school budgets, city and county social services, and infrastructure projects.

It's Compassion-less Conservatism run by a single question:  "Why does my tax money go to help anyone but me?"  And if that doesn't sum up Cincy Republican politics, I dunno what does.

They will go far here.  Very far.  And they will be with us a long time.