Is the Tea Party Winding Down?

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's recent surge in the polls is a sign that the Tea Party movement has lost its vigor, Clarence Page writes in his Chicago Tribune column. Why? The movement began in order to stamp out insiders like Gingrich, who is now riding high.

... The tea partiers rose up angrily in early 2009 to expose and clean out what they saw as Washington fat cats and wheeler-dealers who line their pockets while raising taxes, expanding government and spending taxpayers' money.

Now, less than a month before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses, the movement has become a faction of the party whose front-runners are Mitt Romney, whom the right largely rejects as being too moderate and flippy-floppy, and Gingrich, the quintessential Washington insider.

Gingrich is the man who has earned millions by doing precisely what the tea party rages against: advising, promoting and lobbying for big corporate and public policy interests. That includes at least $1.6 million he was paid by Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored home-lending entity that many conservatives blame for the financial crisis.

Read Clarence Page's entire column at the Chicago Tribune.

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