NASHVILLE - Four Tennessee tea party activists who said they couldn't afford the $550 tickets to the National Tea Party Convention staged a guerilla news conference just outside of the event to challenge its representation of the movement. "There are a lot of citizens in the state of Tennessee today who could not afford to be here... particularly in this economy," said Antonio Hinton, a 37-year old tea party activist from Knoxville. "They're just as patriotic. They're just as concerned. They care just as much about what's going on as the folks that are in that room." The convention's steep ticket price, combined with its top-down organizational structure and the $100,000 speaking fee its organizers paid keynote speaker Sarah Palin all fly in the face of the grassroots tea party movement, Hinton and his three cohorts asserted in a quickly put-together press conference outside the convention hall. About 40 journalists and camera people from the heavy media contingent covering the convention gathered around the four dissidents in a hotel lobby outside the entrance to the banquet room hosting most convention activities, as curious convention-goers crammed their necks to get a look at the spectacle, after which some challenged assertions made by the four. All four of the men protesting the convention are part of a recently formed coalition of 34 tea party groups from around Tennessee that does not include the group behind the convention. The four contended the coalition, the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition, is more representative of the conservative populist movement, whose members have nonetheless chafed at being associated too closely with the Republican Party and its political leaders.
NASHVILLE - Four Tennessee tea party activists who said they couldn't afford the $550 tickets to the National Tea Party Convention staged a guerilla news conference just outside of the event to challenge its representation of the movement.
"There are a lot of citizens in the state of Tennessee today who could not afford to be here... particularly in this economy," said Antonio Hinton, a 37-year old tea party activist from Knoxville. "They're just as patriotic. They're just as concerned. They care just as much about what's going on as the folks that are in that room."
The convention's steep ticket price, combined with its top-down organizational structure and the $100,000 speaking fee its organizers paid keynote speaker Sarah Palin all fly in the face of the grassroots tea party movement, Hinton and his three cohorts asserted in a quickly put-together press conference outside the convention hall.
About 40 journalists and camera people from the heavy media contingent covering the convention gathered around the four dissidents in a hotel lobby outside the entrance to the banquet room hosting most convention activities, as curious convention-goers crammed their necks to get a look at the spectacle, after which some challenged assertions made by the four.
All four of the men protesting the convention are part of a recently formed coalition of 34 tea party groups from around Tennessee that does not include the group behind the convention. The four contended the coalition, the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition, is more representative of the conservative populist movement, whose members have nonetheless chafed at being associated too closely with the Republican Party and its political leaders.
