(Chuck Muth) – Outsiders who aren’t part of the tea party movement can’t seem to understand why most tea party activists are so opposed to the formation of the Tea Party of Nevada (TPN) party in Nevada – and especially the candidacy of this poseur Scott Ashjian, TPN’s pretty-boy candidate for U.S. Senate.
It’s really pretty simple – and it goes well beyond that fact that Ashjian doesn’t know the secret handshake or the action-inducing code words to use in media interviews.
While he claims to support the agenda and views of the tea party movement, Ashjian’s never been actively involved in the tea party movement. He simply saw all the media coverage of the tea party movement and decided to jump out in front of the parade and say, “Follow me.”
Consider the following facts which have not been widely reported by the media:
1.) No one has actually formed a Tea Party of Nevada. At least not yet. They’ve filed some paperwork to place ONE CANDIDATE on the ballot using the “Tea Party” name. That’s it.
2.) They qualified their one candidate for the ballot using their name by gathering only about 300 signatures on a petition – signatures of people who, we’ve since found out, had no idea what they were signing! Many were UNLV poli-sci students who now say they were misled. In any event, it sure as hell wasn’t tea party activists who signed the petition putting Ashjian on the ballot.
3.) Unlike the Independent American Party, the Libertarian Party and the Green Party, no convention of Tea Party members was held to nominate Ashjian as a candidate. It was a half-dozen people who filed some paperwork with the Secretary of State.
Six people get to decide in private and in secret who the U.S. Senate candidate is on behalf of the thousands upon thousands of tea party activists in Nevada without a vote? And he’s supposed to be considered legitimate? I don’t think so.
The real tea party activists who have been meeting, organizing and rallying for the better part of the last year know who’s who in the movement – and they know Ashjian isn’t one of them because, well, because Ashjian has never had anything to do with the movement, other than, according to him, showing up for the tea party rally at Sunset Park last April 15th with thousands of other people.
Worse, Ashjian never bothered to even touch base with the known and active tea party leaders before popping off and filing his new third party, filching the name they’ve been rallying under for the past year. No wonder these people are ready to tar-and-feather the guy.
But it goes deeper than that. Any true tea partier knows the #1 electoral objective of tea party activists in Nevada is the defeat of U.S. Sen. Harry Reid in November. And even a blithering idiot knows that placing a third-party candidate on the ballot under the “Tea Party” name has the potential of siphoning off votes from the Republican candidate who will have the only real chance to accomplish that goal.
Which, politically speaking, makes Ashjian dumber than a blithering idiot. Go figure.
The simple fact is, if Scott Ashjian’s motivation in forming the TPN was truly in the interest of furthering the tea party movement and not furthering Scott Ashjian’s ego and/or business interests, he would have done so by filing as a TPN candidate for any office OTHER than U.S. Senate. He could have run for Congress, governor, secretary of state, attorney general or even a seat in the Nevada Legislature.
But no. He filed to run against Harry Reid. Because that’s where the cameras and microphones would be despite the fact he has absolutely no chance whatsoever on God’s green earth of winning that race. This is all about Scott Ashjian, not the tea party movement.
This yahoo has taken political opportunism to an entirely new level. It’d almost be comical if the potential consequence of his folly – the reelection of Harry Reid – wasn’t so serious for the future of our state and our nation.