Playboy magazine features article by Teabagger insider.

From Playboy:

"You’re going to see something spectacular," an old friend who has a knack for black-bag operations said as he proudly downed his vodka. "About a month from now you’ll see ACORN explode from within." Right on schedule a video was released that showed undercover conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles getting advice from employees at the Baltimore office of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now on how to smuggle underage El Salvadoran girls into a fictitious brothel.

That’s when I realized this isn’t an average fringe movement. This one is credible, legit and—for the first time in a decade—scaring the crap out of the left. In my years as a campaign hack and then as a consultant, I’ve created more than my share of fake grassroots organizations. Some were downright evil but effective beyond expectations. Did you get an automated call from the sister of a 9/11 victim asking you to reelect President Bush in 2004? That was me. Did you get a piece of mail with the phrase supports abortion on demand as a means of birth control? That may have been me too.

Conservatives had been trying to take down ACORN for three decades. Where they failed, BigGovernment.com and my friends succeeded. In one magnificent explosion, a loose group of troublemakers, libertarians and Republicans took its first scalp. Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chair of ACORN’s Maryland chapter, told The New York Times in March, "That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work."

They were once the fringe that now believes the Republicans are weak and that it is time to take control of a party which has lost it's way.

Conservatives now live in the political-party equivalent of Mad Max. Law and order inside the Republican Party has deteriorated, leaving regional warlords to scavenge over what’s left. The trouble is that some of the regional warlords are nuts or crooks. Among the better-known scavengers is Eric Odom’s Tea Party-related PAC, Liberty First, which I believe will be able to raise and spend millions this fall.

The rivalry between different Tea Party groups is real, and the leaders in Odom’s group don’t care much for the other leaders. Other groups are spending political capital fighting to lead a movement. My guys see it more as a fight to help reshape the debate and protect future generations from creeping socialism and unimaginable debt. One of my people puts it better: "There’s room for lots of organizations. There’s room to focus on different races. Eric Odom’s group is more traditional. We’re a little more edgy. We use dirty words." A large number of people in our group have military backgrounds. Whenever squabbles erupt, their catchphrase is "Remember, guys, the enemy is to the left." Then their eyes literally drift to the left.


Sarah Palin is NOT the leader of the Teabaggers. That "honor" seems to fall to Andrew Breitbart.

When Breitbart gestured to the print reporters at a Tea Party event in Nashville and said, "It’s not your business model that sucks; it’s you that sucks," he whipped Tea Party members into a frenzy unlike anything I’d ever seen. Breitbart is one of them, except smarter, better connected and angrier; compared with him, Palin is Las Vegas dinner theater. That’s why he is loved by Tea Partyers in a way Palin can never hope to be loved.

The group is finding more and more conservative politicians coming to them for support and instructions.

Various Republican congressional leaders met for hours with our leadership and our finance team in the Richard Nixon suite at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington. Never in my career had I had a congressman look me in the eyes behind closed doors and say with such sincerity, "Give me a list of what you need me to do." The second meeting drew 10 congressmen. There we sat, inside the Capitol Hill Club (which shares the building that houses the Republican National Committee), sharing ideas on how we can work together. The third meeting drew 17 congressmen. We’ll see help with fundraising and research from friendly members of Congress. It’s what you won’t see that’s more important. Our role is to quietly help a dozen grassroots conservative candidates win in the fall, using traditional and nontraditional means. If you don’t hear from us directly, we will have done our job.

However according to this insider the movement is probably NOT a long term threat politically.

The reality is the Tea Party as we know it will cease to exist within an election cycle. Its ideas won’t go away, but most of its leaders will. That’s because most self-appointed leaders in this world simply don’t know how to win.Mark my words: Without proper experienced guidance they will fuck it up. Rallies don’t win elections—votes do. Their egos are writing checks their organizations will never cash. In this world, anything from the Beltway is tainted. With the exception of one other person, the rest of our team is no less than 700 miles away. Therein lies the rub: Most people living in the hinterlands tend to have trouble mastering the finer points of creating and funding 501(c)(4) organizations and leveraging that support into targeted independent expenditures in races in which limited soft dollars can make a difference