Havenstein to Tea Party: Drop dead
The war of words between conservative activists and GOP party regulars escalated this week as Walt Havenstein, the party establishment’s choice to take on Gov. Maggie Hassan, refused to apologize for referring to Tea Party activists as “teabaggers.”
A video clip of Havenstein’s original comments, which he made during a 2010 talk at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business, was posted on YouTube last week. In it, Havenstein tells the group, “We’ve got a lot of problems in this country. The teabaggers, or whatever they are, they’ve been telling us that all summer long.”
Early Tea Party activists embraced the “teabagging” double-entendre, urging protesters to “Tea Bag the White House” and to “Tea Bag the Liberal Dems Before They Tea Bag You.” However, by late 2010 when Havenstein made his comments, most Tea Partiers regarded it as a derogatory epithet.
In a gathering with the Belknap County Republican Committee on Wednesday, GraniteGrok’s Skip Murphy asked Havenstein for a public apology. “No,” replied Havenstein.
“I did not know the nature of that word at the time I used it,” he explained. “It was a poor choice, not because I didn’t know, it was a poor choice because it was inappropriate, not for the context of my talk.”
“Frankly,” he continued, “I was giving credit to the Tea Party in that talk for the extraordinary changes that were about to come as a result of the election that had happened the day before. And if you look at the full context of my remarks, that’s what I was talking about,” Havenstein said. “So for me to apologize for something I had no contextual reference for is inappropriate and I won’t do that.”
It’s not the first time the party’s Tea Party activists and party regulars have clashed. In November, GOP National Committeeman Steve Duprey referred to the “far right fringe of the Tea Party” as “flat earth believers” at a state party executive committee meeting.