Conservatives launch PACs to grab for Tea Party cash

By Kenneth P. Vogel 

Conservative leaders are eager to turn Tea Party anger into election-year cash – and to do that, they’re launching a flurry of new political action committees aimed at collecting small-dollar donations from newly engaged anti-tax, anti-spending activists.

The latest entrant: Take Back America PAC, to be launched this week by FreedomWorks, the conservative group and Tea Party leader run by former House Republican leader Dick Armey.

Armey said the goal of the new PAC is “to show that if Republicans pick their candidates with a message of restraint of big government and respect for individual liberty, it will translate into electoral success. If they don’t do that, they will probably get what I will call ‘gentle reminders’ from all of the grassroots activists in their districts that they need to be a lot more like Reagan Republicans or they can expect that they might lose their own primary.”

The PAC, which plans to support conservative Republicans Marco Rubio and Pat Toomey in Senate primaries in Florida and Pennsylvania, respectively, is also considering supporting Rand Paul’s GOP Senate campaign in Kentucky — and opposing the reelection bids of Democratic Sens. Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, in Nevada and Chris Dodd in Connecticut.

When Take America Back sends out its first fundraising email this week to FreedomWorks’ 415,000 online members, it will join a crowded and growing field of campaign vehicles vying for Tea Partiers’ donations.

The Liberty First PAC was officially launched last week by early Tea Party organizer Eric Odom. GrassRootsPAC, a new project organized partly by the president of the Tea Party-linked American Majority organizing group, is planning a hard rollout next year. And the California-based Our Country Deserves Better PAC–TeaPartyExpress.org, added the “TeaPartyExpress.org” to its name in October after raking in big bucks for an eponymous cross-country bus tour.

The common goal of the groups is to transform the Tea Party movement into something of a conservative answer to MoveOn.org, a mechanism for bringing in huge numbers of small checks to help elect small-government fiscal conservatives and to defeat incumbents supportive of the big-money initiatives pushed by President Obama and his allies in the Democratic Congress.

But the sudden emergence of so many groups has raised concerns among activists about dissipating the energy behind the already fractured Tea Party movement, and has buoyed Democratic hopes that the Tea Party movement will spark a Republican civil war, resulting in bloody primaries that will leave the GOP limping into the 2010 midterm elections with damaged or fringe candidates.

Armey dismissed suggestions of an “internecine conflict within the Republican Party” as “simply inaccurate. That’s like saying that Methodists who disagree with Presbyterians are fomenting a war inside the Presbyterian Church.”

But the Methodists never had an army quite like this.

On Monday evening, the grassroots umbrella group Tea Party Patriots is set to hold a conference call with local organizers across the country to discuss plans to form its own PAC, while the upstart Tea Party Nation, a for-profit company, intends to use any profits it generates from the national Tea Party convention it’s organizing in February to fund a so-called 527 organization that would air ads supporting candidates who embrace the movement’s ideals.

“It's time for the tea party movement to start flexing its muscle in the electoral process," Odom said in announcing the launch of Liberty First, which he said collected $11,500 in its first week of fundraising, and has accepted pledges for another $98,000. He predicted that his PAC could raise upwards of $500,000 for the 2010 Congressional midterms by collecting contributions of $100 or less from the hundreds of thousands of activists who turned out for April 15 Tax Day Tea Parties around the country, which he helped organize.

“A lot of these Tea Partiers are saying they want political change,” said Ned Ryun, president of American Majority and a leader of GrassRootsPAC. “And what we’re saying is if you’re going to make political change, you’re going to have to give political money. You need money to win.”

But Judson Phillips, president of Tea Party Nation, acknowledged there’s some disagreement among activists about whether raising money for candidates runs afoul of the issue-based focus that spurred the movement, which to some extent arose as a backlash to Obama’s healthcare reform plans.

“If the Tea Party movement is only about doing protests, going out having our rallies, then the movement has failed,” he said. “The only way the Tea Party movement is going to be successful in 2010 is if we are able to get out there and elect good officeholders to replace the bad ones we have in there.,” he said, adding “the simple fact of the matter is that if you are not going to get candidates elected without money.”

But Erick Erickson, editor of the influential conservative blog RedState.com, said he’s “skeptical of a lot of the operations being set up so quickly. It seems like there are so many groups all of a sudden, I’m having trouble keeping track of who’s who.”

Though he’s advising GrassRootsPAC, he said he tells many would-be donors to give their money to more established conservative groups, including the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservatives Fund, a leadership PAC chaired by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a Tea Party darling.

DeMint’s fund and SarahPAC, a leadership fund headed by former Alaska governor – and fellow movement favorite – Sarah Palin, have benefitted from their standing with Tea Partiers.

DeMint’s group had raised $1.1 million this year through the end of October, though it’s tougher to quantify the impact of the movement on Palin’s PAC and the others mentioned in this report, since they won’t be required to report their hauls for the second half of this year until January.

Erickson, whose blog has both chronicled and helped guide the Tea Party movement, said next year’s elections will be critical in determining which of the new groups will have staying power.

“I am going to sit back and watch these groups shape up and not advise anyone to give them money until they’ve actually gone through an election cycle,” he said.