Politico.com
The group, Ensuring Liberty Corp., is a nonprofit that will do direct marketing and organizing and will eventually be accompanied by a political action committee arm of the same name that will contribute directly to candidates.
Its group’s president, Mark Skoda, presented it, during a news conference jam-packed with national and international press, as the next step in the grass-roots tea party movement.
“The idea is essentially to act as ferocious as we are about our government being fiscally responsible as we will about our political process,” said Skoda, a 55-year-old technology consultant from Memphis who helped organize the convention.
Reminding reporters that “this is a part-time movement, we all have day jobs,” Skoda said his group “will allow people from around the country, perhaps in districts that are not competitive, to be able to participate their skills, to contribute their time, figure out what’s going on in other locations and ultimately contribute money to be used to fund numerous races across the country.”
Ensuring Liberty enters a crowded field of political groups seeking to channel the energy behind the tea party movement into fundraising. A search of an Internal Revenue Service database on Friday found 25 nonprofit groups with “tea party” in their name. And, in the past few months, several existing political action committees have positioned themselves to raise money from newly engaged tea party activists, while a handful of fresh efforts have recently launched.
The common goal is to transform the tea party movement into something of a conservative answer to the liberal small-dollar powerhouse MoveOn.org; each group wants to gobble up huge numbers of small checks from hyperengaged activists to elect small-government fiscal conservatives and to defeat incumbents supportive of the big-money initiatives pushed by President Barack Obama and his allies in the Democratic Congress.
Skoda says Ensuring Liberty will select 15 to 20 races to get involved in and will differentiate itself from other tea party political groups by being more transparent in its accounting, fundraising and spending, as well as through its use of cell phone-based technology to raise money and communicate. He said it has an agreement with a California company called Win by Cell to set up interfaces including “cell blogging,” that will pay the company 18 cents per transaction, with a maximum payment of $120,000 per year
- Ensuring Liberty's common goal is to transform the tea party movement into something of a conservative answer to the liberal small-dollar powerhouse MoveOn.org. Photo: AP
At the news conference, convention organizer Judson Phillips, who will not be involved in Ensuring Liberty, said he was planning another convention of sorts for July, which will be funded in part by any profits from this weekend’s gathering. He joked that the corporation he runs, Tea Party Nation, which is putting on the convention and is struggling to break even, expected to turn a profit “in the high two figures.”
Earlier in the day, the roughly 600 attendees, who came primarily from the South and were largely white and older, participated in organizer training sessions and heard speeches from Tom Fitton, head of the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, and Roy Moore, the former Alabama Supreme Court judge who refused a federal judge’s order to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from a state courthouse. Moore is running for governor of Alabama in 2010.
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin — a tea party superstar — is scheduled to deliver the keynote address Saturday night, and several convention-goers said she drew them to the convention, for which tickets cost $550.
“She’s great; that’s why we’re here,” said Nancy Bunting, a retiree from Hilton Head Island, S.C., who traveled to Nashville with her husband, Bob, neither of whom had been active in politics before becoming involved in the tea party movement.
