“Columbia County Tea Party endorses Gibson” read a recent headline in the Register-Star, referring to the candidacy of Republican Chris Gibson of Kinderhook who is challenging Scott Murphy of Glens falls for Congress this fall.
But who (or what) is the Columbia County Tea Party, exactly?
A search of New York State’s Campaign Finance Disclosure site does not turn up anything resembling a Columbia County Tea Party in its records—no authorized or non-authorized committee, no political action committee, nor any constituted party. Here’s what you get when searching for “Columbia” anywhere in the name of groups in their database:
The
Reg-Star article indicates that the news of the endorsement came from “Ed Fertik of the Claverack Tea Party,” another purported political group not listed in the State’s registry of groups making election expenditures:
This absence of State filing (along with a little Google searching), suggest that at this point both “parties” exist primarily in the vivid imagination of Mr. Fertik—who lately has been submitting
fire-breathing letters-to-the-editor of the Reg-Star. He’s thus far denounced everything from “hippie violence” to "Obamunism" to
Our Town, The Claverack Quarterly—
claiming he’s going to publish a competing magazine called
Our Town Too.
Links from similarly tenuous Tea Party sites reveal that Mr. Fertik
began a personal blog back in August 2009, publishing a grand total of 7 posts in the past ten months. Recently he began describing this blog as the “official” site of his Tea Party efforts. Fertik writes that since he started political operations 7 weeks ago, he has been “averaging about four new sympathizers for each week of our existence.”
So by Fertik’s own math, that would suggest that this “endorsement” of Gibson has, optimistically, the backing of 28 “sympathizers” plus Mr. Fertik himself. One can’t help wondering how many of those 28 are even registered to vote, and how much “sympathy” one has to express to be counted among the Tea Party ranks.
Now, citizen engagement in the political process is a good thing. It should be encouraged, and to that extent Mr. Fertik may be commended for wanting to participate—no matter how incoherent or outlandish his political views might be.
He may, however, want to get up to speed on campaign finance disclosure rules if he’s serious about political action. If he wanted to join in a common cause, we probably could agree that the State rules made by the Republicans and Democrats make it far too onerous for new political groups to get off the ground.
At the same time, one also wonders what the press standard should be for calling oneself a full-fledged political party and having such “endorsements” treated like real news. It's tempting to start a Columbia County Tree Party, and see if it receives the same treatment...
