Karen Cage is unconcerned that Mitt Romney is hardly the kind of candidate the populist Tea Party movement had hoped would be their standard bearer in November’s general election.
The president of the Lakeside Tea Party says her members’ dislike for Romney “is minimized by their hatred for Obama.
“Now that (Romney) is the one, the most important thing is to defeat Barack Obama,” Cage said this week.
Polls taken by the Lakeside group during the campaign season showed that the former governor of Massachusettes was never their first choice to be the Republican presidential candidate.
Suggesting that almost everyone in the Tea Party movement will eventually “come around” to supporting Romney (even Michelle Bachmann), Cage said she expected the Republican nominee to now “come out strongly” on many important issues, most notably “the debt, unemployment numbers, the mismanagement of government at every level and foreign affairs.“At our last meeting we had a round robin discussion and people were as angry as I have ever seen them. They were so upset over lack of jobs, the debt and deficit, high gas prices. And I don’t think Obama is handling the Israeli-Iraq situation in the best interests of the United States.”
Following the 2010 midterms, when many establishment Republicans were defeated by Tea Party backed candidates in primaries, Romney’s victory returns a sense of normality to the GOP.
But this does not mean the Tea Party is about to lose its significance or influence, Cage said.
“The whole point of the Tea Party was to get Obama out, not to get a particular candidate in.
“Our main mission is fiscal conservatism and to get someone in there who will, please God, address the debt and the deficit.
“Although myself and my husband and don’t have children or grandchildren, I fear there are lot of people in the United States who are not going to enjoy the same freedoms we had.”
At the next meeting of the Lakeside Tea Party (held on the second Tuesday of each month), Cage said a retired U.S. physician will talk about President Obama’s health care bill and what it means if the Supreme Court rejects it or deems it constitutional.