Tea-ing it up...

I’m so confused.  Is Tommy a tea person or not?

The shot above, captured by Politico.com, shows Tommy a few months back, Tea Party flag proudly flapping in the wind behind him, whipping up the crowd in Madison.

Yet when I asked someone who’s supposed to know about these things, he told me Tommy is the antithesis of everything the Tea people stand for: big spending, big government, mass transit, yadda yadda yadda.

Last week Tommy and his pals Scotty and Becky put on a show at the Leach Amphitheater in Oshkosh, drawing a crowd (?) of nearly 200 people, and giving speeches about what they consider to be important things.  Scotty, of course, said he deserves to win the recall because he’s doing great things for Wisconsin.  Becky said pretty much the same thing.

But Tommy can’t just stand behind the lectern (although, nearly everyone in the media calls a lectern a podium – which is something you stand on, not stand behind) and give a talk.  Tommy gets out from behind the lectern and paces up and down the stage, giving his patented fire-‘em-up speech about ‘sconsin and all the good things about ‘sconsin like the Packers and the Badgers.  Man, there’s some real cutting-edge stuff: let’s cheer for the Packers and the Badgers!  Yay

Anyway, I digress, as usual.  In the most recent Oshkosh talk, Tommy let the cat out of the bag: he said he’d been talkin’ (Tommy usually drops his g’s) with a bunch of business people the past few days, and they’re tellin’ him that they’re just rarin’ to go with more hirin’, spendin’, expandin’ their inventories, and pumpin’ up the state economy, but they’re not gonna do it until after Scotty wins the recall.  Tommy didn’t say what would happen if Scotty loses, but it’s fair to assume that if that Barrett fellow wins, there’ll be no hirin’, spendin’, expandin’, or pumpin’ up.

If I were still working in the nooz biz up in the Fox Valley, I would have called Tommy’s people after the speech and said something snotty like “certainly you can provide me with the names of the business leaders Tommy has been talking to about these expansion plans that will happen after Scotty wins, because I’d hate to think that Tommy just made that stuff up….and I don’t want to go over his itinerary for the past few weeks and try to make educated guesses about who the secret job-creators are.”

I guess we’ll just be left to wonder who those mystery job-creators are, until after the 5^th of June.  And as to the question of whether Tommy is a tea person or not: I guess the answer depends on who’s askin’.