Salit: Tea party activists: Don't confuse them with independents

Hey, don't get caught with your pants down around independents if you're going to the tea party...

Great article by Jackie Salit in today's Christian Science Monitor "Tea Party activists: Don't confuse them with independents."

Contrary to some of the spin, the tea party movement is not part of the independent movement. Anyone playing the political game, from the president, to the politicians, to the pollsters, confuses them at their peril.  

Salit, current president of IndependentVoting.org and a veteran of the 80s and 90s national battleground skirmishes to establish a viable independent third party -- and who has since led her minions-turned-tens-of-thousands into a "parties? no thank you!" broad-based non-ideological anti-party pro-independent movement for political reform, goes on to say in this article:

Bursting onto the scene in 1992 with an outpouring for Ross Perot, the independent movement began as largely white, leaning center-right. While the movement was quintessentially anti-establishment, left-liberals wrote it off as hopelessly right-wing.

But a network of unorthodox independent leftists with a base in the black, Latino, gay, and progressive communities, reached out to forge a populist coalition with the Perotistas. Appealing to the need to bring all Americans together against a self-dealing, corrupt two-party arrangement, a new coalition took root inside the Perot movement, which led to the creation of the national Reform Party. 

 Read on!