You Say You Want a Revolution?

Tea Party doyenne Diana Reimer has big plans for you, Philadelphia.

by Holly Otterbein

Neal Santos

Perhaps the last place you'd expect to find the Tea Party is Philadelphia.

The movement is unsurprisingly absent from most big cities in general, but Philly seems especially averse to it. This is where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one, the Philly GOP is quiescent and 45 percent of the population is black (and countless thousands more are illegal immigrants).

Yet it's Feb. 27, and a few dozen members of the Philadelphia Tea Party Patriots group are gathered at the Rittenhouse Square restaurant La Fontana Della Citta, eating gnocchi and grilled salmon with pesto sauce and linguine with clams. Artifacts from this morning's demonstration at Broad and Washington, including pocket-size copies of the Constitution, several "Don't Tread on Me" flags and a sign stating "Reid My Lips: No Reconciliation," are stashed underneath people's chairs and inside their cars.

The group is here to celebrate a milestone: Exactly one year ago today, the Tea Party was born. The man who fathered this populist movement, which has been credited with everything from getting Republican Sen. Scott Brown elected in Massachusetts to almost derailing health care reform, is Rick Santelli, a bombastic CNBC on-air editor. On the morning of Feb. 27, 2009, he castigated the Obama administration's proposal to assist homeowners facing foreclosure. He said the homeowners were "losers" and called for a Chicago Tea Party, à la the 1773 Boston Tea Party. Conservative rallies bearing the Tea Party moniker quickly popped up throughout the country, espousing the virtues of smaller government and fewer taxes. By April, the movement had spread to Philadelphia.

Midway through the birthday party, Diana Reimer, a petite 67-year-old with close-cropped hair, takes the floor. She is an exceptionally warm, perky woman who punctuates every parting with a hug. Her husband, Don, an avuncular, round-bellied man, stands proudly beside her. She asks that everyone in the room share their "favorite Tea Party memories" of the past year. A few people mention Santelli's speech, but most talk about more local, personal moments: the Tax Day and July 4 rallies at LOVE Park, the time a Philly Tea Partier served U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter with a homemade "pink slip" for his "bad behavior."

It's exactly what you'd expect from a Tea Party event, but then suddenly it isn't.

Robert Allen Mansfield, a broad-shouldered black man in his late 30s, stands up. He is wearing a black suit, tiny, round glasses and a blue tie, and props himself up with a cane. He strays from the topic at hand, talking about what it was like to be a sergeant for eight months in Iraq. He then orders everyone who has served in the military to rise for applause; more than half the men in the room jump to their feet.

It's a poignant moment. Mansfield's face crumples, as if about to cry. But suddenly he perks up. He's got something to say. "I wasn't going to do this, but," he says, pausing. "I'm running for governor."

The mostly white Tea Party members furiously clap and cheer and squeeze his shoulders.

Later, Carol Sano, a Gayborhood resident, says she's thrilled a black man affiliated with the Tea Party is running. "I'm starting a Tea Party group in Center City," she explains. "And I want it to look like Center City — it needs to have young people and African-Americans and gays in it."

Surveying the room, it appears that Sano's hope for a more diverse Tea Party has, at least compared to Tea Parties elsewhere, been partially realized. There are more than a few young people and blacks here, as well as lots of women, and everyone is happily mingling.

The unlikely scene poses a question: What happens when the Tea Party finds itself in a major American city? Does it thrive, or shrivel up? Does it focus its energies on fighting health care legislation or the soda tax? Is it less — or more — racist? The New Yorker, The New York Times and even Philadelphia Weekly have surveyed Tea Parties like exacting anthropologists in Media, northern Kentucky, the 'burbs and the Nevada desert, but the press has yet to examine its strangest specimen yet: the urban Tea Party.

Reimer woke up.

To "wake up" in the Tea Party is not to roll out of bed, but to become politically informed. It's an apothegm that hints at the fact that most people in the movement have never been interested in politics before, and came to be only after a vigorous epiphany shook them to action.

Reimer's revelation occurred when the Bush administration declared war on Iraq, a fact that supports the Tea Party's claim that its members are displeased with both Democrats and Republicans. "Was the war right, was it wrong?" she asks. "Don" — her husband — "feels it was right. I feel I don't know, you know?"

Although Reimer says the Iraq War was her wake-up call, she didn't get involved in any anti-war movements in 2003. In fact, she wouldn't become an activist for another six years — not until after a wave of fiscal imprudence swept the nation, she says, engulfing even the Republican Party that she'd voted for since Ronald Reagan became president in 1981.

"There was TARP and all the bailouts, and these rich people are getting all this money, yet Don and I can't sell our house," she laments. "Then Mr. Obama comes in and bails out the banks and AIG, and look at these people, look at all the money they have!" (The bank bailouts were initiated by the Bush administration in fall 2008, with the support of both the Obama and McCain presidential campaigns.)

Like many people in the Tea Party, Reimer is a lifelong member of the middle class, and has an appealing hardiness because of it. She grew up in Tioga, where her father was a Democratic committeeman for many years. She went to West Philadelphia High, but left as a sophomore to attend business school, and eventually met Don. She had two children with him, moved to Lansdale, and for the next few decades made a living as a secretary, house-keeper and department store employee.

By the time she was in her mid-60s, Reimer was ready to retire. She and Don planned to "sell off the house, pay some bills and buy something smaller," and then travel the country.

Neal Santos

But the economy crumbled. "When we put our house on the market, we found out we had lost $40,000 in equity," she says.

Ironically, she was in a similar boat as the "losers" Santelli mocked on CNBC for facing foreclosure. Coupled with the fact that Don had suffered two layoffs throughout his career and she had just quit her job at Macy's, Reimer was crushed. She grew angry that she didn't qualify for unemployment, and thought it unfair that Don's unemployment compensation had been reduced because he also received military retirement benefits.

The recession had shoved the Reimers to the lower end of the middle class, where they weren't poor enough to qualify for government assistance, but they also weren't rich enough to afford what the American dream says they deserve after a lifetime of work. And yet, Reimer didn't find comfort in the Democratic Party. Instead, she grew increasingly conservative, and read more about politics online. Then one day she saw a story about a Tea Party.

"I was frustrated, but what could I do? Who could I talk to?" she asks. "Then I found out about the Tea Party, and I said, that's it! That's how you get your voice heard."

She immediately logged on to the Tea Party Patriots' Web site and signed up to be the Philadelphia organizer of the upcoming Tax Day protest at LOVE Park, which went on to attract several hundreds of attendees.

She'd never been to a protest before, let alone organized one. But she had surprising foresight. Reimer knew full well it would be easier to find fellow Tea Partiers in West Chester, Valley Forge or the Main Line, and that a more realistic person might hold a Tax Day protest in one of those places. But she was determined to grow the movement here in Philly, and not just because it's her hometown.

"This is the cradle of liberty," she says. "This is where all of it — the whole country — got started. It had to be in Philly." Indeed, the city is associated with much of what the Tea Party canonizes: the Constitution, the founding fathers, notions of independence and liberty.

On second thought, maybe Philadelphia is exactly where you should expect to find the Tea Party.

A year after that first Tax Day protest, Reimer has made surprising progress.

She is now a national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, and though she'll tell you "there are no leaders in the Tea Party," she is undoubtedly at the helm of the movement in Philly. After organizing her first protest in April, she organized the July 4 rally; after that she began taking monthly trips to Washington, D.C., befriending the members of Congress she deems worthy, like Iowa Republican Steve King, and browbeating others she finds unbearable, like Montgomery County Democrat Allyson Schwartz.

In her most recent trip to the Capitol, she was joined by six buses full of people from the Philadelphia area, all rallying against health care legislation.

Reimer, who is on Medicare, opposes the health care law for many reasons, though some are fuzzy, and others are factually inaccurate. She dislikes that it forces you to buy health care: "America is about choice," she argues. She fears that it will give the IRS the power to "monitor your checking account" willy-nilly. She also calls the bill "probably the worst" swipe to the anti-abortion cause "in history." (In reality, the health care bill did nothing to obstruct or advance this cause.)

Locally, Reimer has focused primarily on growing the Tea Party in Philadelphia. Her strategy for this is two-pronged. Firstly, she's been working with Don on what she calls the "precinct project," in which they persuade conservatives to run for local committee positions. It's an attempt to change the GOP from the inside out, and mirrors how the Moral Majority, a religious right movement in the 1980s, gained power by electing people to school boards and other small-time positions.

Secondly, she's formed small-scale Tea Party groups in various parts of the city and suburbs, including the Northeast, South Philly, Center City, Bucks County and Montgomery County, with one on the way in West Philly. The groups, which each contain five to 15 people, meet monthly in people's homes and pizza shops and restaurants. They talk about everything from the soda tax to illegal immigration.

"I'd like to find every last conservative in Philadelphia," she says with a charming giggle, though it's clear she's not kidding. "My plan is to circle the city with these groups, which we already have five of, and slowly take over Philly."

Neal Santos EVERYWHERE A SIGN: A Tea Partier at the March Freedom Fest lodges her opposition to the health care reform law.

In early March, Sano holds one such meeting in her Gayborhood home, a stunning condo built in the 1920s whose door is adorned with an American flag. "The flag lets us know we're in the right place," a Tea Partier says approvingly upon arrival. The scene isn't what you'd expect, exactly. There are doctors, lawyers, GOP ward leaders and realtors inside, and most of them are dressed in suits and ties. Matthew Wolfe, a Republican ward leader, passes around a flier criticizing Mayor Nutter's proposed soda tax and trash fees.

Sano, a Philly transplant by way of New York City with bleached, blown-out hair, spends most of the night hunched over the oven. While preparing pizza, she critiques the Nutter administration. Sano believes the mayor hasn't made good on his promises to attract international corporations into the city and lower the wage and business tax.

"I worked for his campaign and voted for him," she says. "He was the shining star, and now he's such a disappointment."

Once everyone settles down, the topic of conversation centers on how to foster a more diverse Tea Party. "We need to get more young people here," says a middle-aged man. "The way to do it is with the fiscal issues. We're never going to get them on the social issues. That's something you don't come around to until you're my age."

A wrinkled Jewish doctor nods, agreeing that more "young folk" and "Afro-Americans" need to get involved. He suggests that the Center City Tea Party hire someone to court prospective right-wing activists, and that it not be someone who looks like Reimer. In the back of the room, a young, regal-looking black woman who served in the military is standing, and he implores her to be this person.

He probably means well enough, but it's a clumsy, offensive request. She declines.

Mansfield has thought a lot about whether the Tea Party is racist.

The independent gubernatorial candidate, clad in a maroon pinstripe suit, is telling his life story in an Old City café over a mug of coffee. The more he describes it, the harder it is to believe he's a Tea Party mainstay. Mansfield lives in North Philly. As a kid, he was in and out of the city's foster care system — his mother, a heroin addict, put him up for adoption when he was born. He had a poor relationship with his adoptive family, and eventually ran away from home. A tumultuous childhood led to a tumultuous young adulthood — he went through a period of homelessness — but he eventually found solid ground. He says his faith helped.

Mansfield doesn't oppose welfare for the poor. "I'm not against welfare. I was on welfare," he reasons, though he adds that there should be more incentives for people to get off it. So what makes him a conservative, exactly? "I want to restore fiscal sanity to this government," he says.

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It's a viewpoint that, according to him, squares perfectly with the Tea Party, but not the local Republican Party. "In Philadelphia, Republicans are in bed with the Democrats as far as giving out patronage jobs. That's not what the government is there for. Now we want to tax trash to further this patronage. It's nonsense."

There's another reason he's detached himself from Republicans. "I'm an oddball within the Republican Party," he says. "I am a black conservative from the city and Pennsylvania Republicans ... aren't. They don't know what to do with me."

That's not to say he finds the Tea Party racially harmonious. He went to his first Tea Party protest in July, where he estimates the black-to-white ratio was "three to 10,000."

"I became interested in the group," he says, "but very critical."

Rather than shy away from the movement, though, he's courting it, hoping to mold it from within. Part of the reason he's doing this, perhaps, is simply that the Tea Party is allowing him to — as opposed to local and state Republicans, who he claims ignore him. He participated in a national Tea Party conference call in which he argued that protest signs demonizing President Obama are racially insensitive. He told the same thing to Philly Tea Partiers, and asked them to not bring such signs to Freedom Fest, a candidates forum he organized in March. They obliged.

Perhaps more crucially, he says there's one thing the Tea Party has that the Republicans lack: the Reimers. "They have no problem having dinner with people who do not look like them," he says. "I was honored when they called and asked me my advice. They asked me, 'How do we reach out to the black community?' That's big."

Neal Santos THE FACE OF THE MOVEMENT: Local Tea Party leader Diana Reimer and gubernatorial candidate Robert Allen Mansfield are seen here at the Freedom Fest at Independence Mall in early March.

Kevin Kelly agrees that the Philly GOP doesn't do enough to reach out to black people. But then again, he thinks it doesn't do enough to reach out to anyone, period.

He knew the Republican City Committee wasn't for him within five minutes of meeting Michael Meehan, its legal counsel and de facto leader. "The first thing he told me was that we can't win," he says. "Imagine going to George Washington at Valley Forge and him saying to you, 'We love the fact that you're trying to join the ranks, but we can't win.'"

In 2008, Kelly, an entrepreneur, founded the Loyal Opposition, a conservative group that positions itself against both the city Democrats and the Republican City Committee. He hopes it will do something the local GOP can't: get conservatives elected. This perfectly aligns with the Philly Tea Party's goals, so it's no surprise that Kelly is a regular at Tea Party events, including last year's Tax Day protest and the recent rally against Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak's health care forum in the Northeast. He concedes that the Republican City Committee is great at doling out jobs — they control 500 positions at the Philadelphia Parking Authority — but he cares little about that.

"The city is controlled by one party. It's a monopoly. There's no exchange of ideas, and the city has suffered for it. Where a monopoly exists, there's no competition and you get a bad product. Philly is a bad product."

Kelly hopes that if he rounds up enough spirited Tea Partiers, frustrated liberals and disenfranchised Republicans in Philly, he'll be able to get more conservatives into office. There's evidence the Republican City Committee isn't too happy about this, however, possibly because it could disrupt the party's delicate relationship with city Democrats and threaten its ability to control patronage jobs.

LaMott Ebron, a young African-American colleague of Kelly's, is running as a Republican committee person in Nicetown. Soon after obtaining signatures and filing his ballot petition, though, he discovered that a man named Michael Gilliland was challenging him, with Meehan as his attorney. When Ebron went to Gilliland's listed address, though, he found that Gilliland didn't live there. Meehan eventually withdrew his challenge, though the party maintains that Ebron had a "defective petition," in the words of committee chairman Vito Canuso.

Canuso adds that while he has "no problem" with the Tea Party, "the best way to reform government is through the Republican Party."

The fact that people like Ebron and Mansfield haven't felt welcome in the city Republican Party, but have befriended people like Reimer and Kelly, may put Philly in a unique position. Could the Philadelphia Tea Party be better able to attract minorities than the city Republican Party? Even when Tea Partiers at large do egregiously racist things, like chant "nigger" at a black congressman?

It's complicated. Reimer has done much to publicize the local movement's supposed tolerance, including calling members of the NAACP to try to convince them that, regardless of what the national Tea Party is, she is tolerant.

Most of the time, it seems true. But as soon as Reimer starts talking about immigration reform — an issue that many Tea Party members plan on swatting at as viciously as they did health care legislation, when and if Obama pushes for it — her tone changes. The language of racism has always been flecked with nuances and code words, and what one person calls racist another will inevitably defend as something else. One thing, however, is certain: Reimer gets personal when it comes to illegal immigration. Her anger is no longer directed toward the big, bad, powerful government, but a weak racial minority.

"I guess if you were an illegal immigrant you would qualify for every benefit there is," she says with an uncharacteristic sneer. "You would qualify for health care, you would probably get educated, and you would get whatever else America has to offer you. Now, what makes that fair? People are starting to wake up to this, and it's not pretty. You know Obama wants amnesty for all of them? That's pretty scary. Well, see, that's his voter base."

Of course, Reimer says her views toward illegal immigrants have nothing to do with race, and insists that she's perfectly fine with legal Hispanics. Still, the animosity toward illegal immigrants is visceral, and a bit unsettling.

June McWilliam, a Jewish woman and friend of Reimer's who runs Repatriot Radio, a Tea Party radio program in New Jersey, concurs with Reimer. Before joining the Tea Party, she was part of the Minuteman Project, a far-right group whose members patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. She frequently wears a bullet shell casing necklace charm with the Star of David carved into it around her neck.

"The illegals are taking low-wage, low-skill jobs from minorities," she says. "So blacks don't like it, either."

Predicting the death of the Tea Party has become something of a parlor game among liberals, particularly after the Tea Partiers failed to stop Congress from passing health care reform last month. As it stands, though, losing the health care fight has only emboldened them, Reimer says. She is busier than ever. "The phone was off the hook" the day after health care legislation passed, she says. "You can hardly do anything other than answer it anymore."

Though the Tea Party certainly contains fringe elements — racists and birthers and the like — it is too simplistic to dismiss it as a movement of cranks. A February Franklin & Marshall College poll found that 45 percent of Pennsylvanians would vote for a candidate backing Tea Party goals, compared to 34 percent who would not. Even a quarter of Pennsylvania Democrats say they would vote for such a candidate.

And, of course, there are Tea Partiers here in metropolitan, cosmopolitan Philadelphia.

"I would not make the wager that the Tea Party can reshape Philly politics," says Terry Madonna, an F&M Pennsylvania politics professor. "But maybe it could help slow down the city's Democratic machine, or affect midterm elections. Republicans usually turn out more voters in midterm elections, so Democrats go into them with a disadvantage to begin with."

There's no doubt that Pennsylvania and Philly politicians are well aware of the Tea Party's potency. Republican Attorney General Tom Corbett, who is running for governor, has sued the federal government over the health care bill, a nod to Tea Partiers. Pat Toomey, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, has similarly courted the group. And there's at least an indication that the Philly Democratic machine sees the Tea Partiers as a potential threat: Steven Kaplan, an attorney for the Democratic City Committee, went to court to challenge Tea Party-friendly congressional candidate Pia Varma — who stands almost no chance in her bid to unseat Democratic powerhouse Bob Brady, who won 91 percent of the vote in 2008, this fall — and got her kicked off the Republican ballot for not having enough signatures. Varma is now running as an independent.

If Reimer has her way, the movement will maintain its virility for generations to come. She's still charging against health care reform — "Republicans are starting to get it," she says in reference to Corbett and others' lawsuits — and prepping fellow activists for the upcoming fight against immigration reform. She's also organizing the second Tax Day protest, to take place on April 15 at LOVE Park. She doesn't foresee a future when she'll run out of things to be roiled about.

"I'll do this for as long as I can," she says with a chuckle, though it's clear, again, she's very serious. "And hopefully I'll be around for another 20 years or so."

(holly.otterbein@citypaper.net)