LITTLE ROCK — The Tea Party Express chugged into Little Rock at midmorning Saturday, greeted by about 400 flag-waving, button-wearing supporters.
The national tour, which started in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, Nev., on March 27, is making its way across 23 states to Washington, D.C., for a tax-day rally April 15.
Shortly before three tour buses pulled up in front of the state Capitol, Rosemary Dolliver and her daughter Amanda Franks stood under a bright blue sky and said they were attending their second Tea Party event because they fear a socialist takeover of the country.
Dolliver, 58, and Franks,36, who traveled from Magnolia, held upside-down American flags, which they said signaled “distress.”
“It’s not disrespectful,” said Franks, who said her husband, who is in the Arkansas National Guard, had approved of the gesture.
They said they wanted less government and more states’ rights. They said they fear the consequences of a growing deficit.
“This is not the country that you and I grew up in,” said Franks.
Saturday’s event featured a rapper and a crooner who modified Frank Sinatra songs to include Tea Party-themed lyrics.
Several speakers urged Arkansans to vote out Democrats and “RINOS” (Republicans in name only).
“In 2012, we become America again,” said Mark Williams, chairman of the Tea Party Express, which organized the event. He urged the crowd to defeat President Barack Obama, whom he compared to leftist radicals that he worked with in the early 1970s in Boston.
Those Mao-loving communists grew up and now run the country, he told the crowd.
Williams said he had appeared for an early morning interview on Little Rock’s KTHV, Channel 11.
The hosts, he said, were “so bright and chipper... that I thought I’d have to beat one of them to death.”
The media are complicit in keeping the truth from Americans, he said.
The health-care overhaul recently signed into law was the equivalent of the poll tax and other measures that were used to deny civil rights to blacks and others before the Civil Rights Act was passed in the mid-1960s, he said.
Many of the speakers hawked books, CDs and other merchandise. Vendors peddling hats, T-shirts and buttons lined both sides of the walkway to the Capitol steps.
Defeating Arkansas’ U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, a Democrat, is a priority, said Amy Kremer, director of the group’s grass-roots coalitions.
Milling among the crowd were several state Republicans running for federal offices, including U.S. Senate candidates Kim Hendren of Gravette and Conrad Reynolds of Conway, and 2nd Congressional District candidates Tim Griffin and Scott Wallace.
Amidst signs reading “Party like it’s 1773,” “We will not go quietly into the Socialist Night” and yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, one man wore a tie-dyed T-shirt and flip-flops and held a handmade sign that read “Hippies Against Obamacare.”
The Little Rock man said he taught at a local high school, but he didn’t want to give his name for fear of “an audit.”
“I used to be a hippie. ButI grew up and started paying taxes, and everything changed,” he said.
Waco rapper David Saucedo, aka Polatik, rhymed about adhering to the U.S. Constitution.
“Tea Party here, Tea Partythere, Tea Party Movement got them running scared,” he rapped.
The Tea Party isn’t a political party, but a movement, said Williams, the group’s chairman. He said the recent passage of health-care legislation gave its cause “a lot more urgency” than when it last appeared in the state’s capital last fall.
Now, it’s a “battle for America’s soul,” he said.
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 04/04/2010