February 02, 2010 12:57 AM UTC

McInnis Picks and Chooses His "Tea Parties"

•  
• by: Colorado Pols

FOX 31’s Eli Stokols writes:

GOP gubernatorial front-runner Scott McInnis continues to get dinged up in his ongoing effort to secure more support from conservative Tea Party and 9-12 groups…

“I really don’t know what the problem is,” said McInnis spokesman Sean Duffy. “This really is a tempest in a Tea Party pot. [Pols emphasis] We’re meeting with as many different folks as we can. There are so many groups out there and we have to wisely manage Scott’s time. But this notion that he’s not available is totally specious.”

The notion took root last December, after a disastrous Fox News interview in which anchor Neil Cavuto labelled McInnis the “Tea Party candidate” and lathered him in praise (and awful puns) while grossly overstating the nature of the candidate’s support from the party’s grass roots — which took notice and exception to the idea that their support would be taken for granted by McInnis or any GOP candidate who had yet to prove their conservative “bona fides” to the groups face-to-face.

This week, McInnis’s new campaign manager, Nancy Hopper, who has replaced George Culpepper, told the Arapahoe County Republican Men’s Club that McInnis had about a dozen meetings with Tea Party groups. That got back to Lu Ann Busse, chair of the 9-12 Project Colorado Coalition, who fired off an email to group members to determine how many times they’d met with the candidate…

And apparently, they came up with four meetings, well short of the number claimed by “the country’s biggest Tea Party candidate.” Being simple country folk, this inconsistency has them a little upset. It’s not really for us to show McInnis the road out of his ongoing base-relations picke, but dismissing the people he’s been courting for months as a “tempest in a ‘Tea Party’ pot” probably won’t make them very happy.