Their Sights Set on the California Assembly, Tea Party Organizers Swing Through Elk Grove

The California Tea Party bus tour cruised into Elk Grove Thursday afternoon with a message: We’re still here, and we’re more organized than ever.

“You hear people say the Tea Party is going away because we’re not out there waving flags every day,” said Nor-Cal Tea Party Patriots activist Stuart Dodge. “What we’re doing mostly now is getting involved in local politics.”

Dodge, a retired firefighter from Auburn, has been criss-crossing California with a handful of other colorful conservative characters trying to fire up supporters to return control of the state Assembly to Republicans in this year’s elections.

At the tour’s Elk Grove stop, about 30 Tea Party fans from Elk Grove, Lodi and the surrounding area gathered in red T-shirts and baseball caps in the parking lot of the defunct Marie Callender’s restaurant on East Stockton Blvd. Some holding flags, they listened solemnly to speeches about smaller government and patriotic songs set to recordings of booming muskets and tweeting bugles.

“You live here in the battleground,” pro-gun lobbyist Sam Paredes told the crowd, adding that the group is focusing on four swing Assembly districts in the Central Valley—including the 9th, where is facing off against Democratic Assemblymember Richard Pan, among other candidates.

“Sophia is the clear candidate,” Paredes said later in an interview. He said he envisions California primaries as the first domino in a chain reaction that could sweep President Barack Obama from office.

“We did it in 1994 with the Contract With America,” he said. “If California continues to have high unemployment, if the Republican candidate catches fire, if Obama continues to have problems—all of that could create a perfect storm for us.”

The tour, officially called the California Revolution Rise Up Bus Tour and sponsored by several conservative radio stations, started April 14 and aims to hit 18 cities in two weeks.

Besides Dodge and Paredes, the show included Rex Ruth, a Mexican-American author who wore an old-fashioned vest and told stories of the founding fathers, and Eric Golub, a stockbroker-turned-comedian from Los Angeles who specializes in conservative humor. (Sample joke: “The liberals like gun control. We don’t like gun control. So let’s be bipartisan; let’s simply take away all the guns from the liberals and give ‘em to us.”)

Behind the speakers, a bus loomed, emblazoned with the figure of an eagle saucily tipping his three-corner hat and flanked by flags reading ‘Don’t Tread on Me.’ At tables nearby, activists gathered signatures in support of a state ballot proposition creating a part-time legislature and shrinking legislators’ pay to $18,000 per year.

Jennifer Arango, a nurse from Elk Grove, said she liked the idea.

“I don’t think our founding fathers intended to make politics a career,” she said. “They were supposed to serve our country and then go back to their profession. They get so out of touch and don’t know what it’s like to work and earn a paycheck.”

(The proposal will not make it onto the ballot this year, the Sacramento Bee reports, but backers are continuing to collect signatures with the aim of qualifying it for 2014.)

Arango, who described herself as conservative, said she and her husband had been dropping off her daughter at work at a restaurant nearby and stopped to hear the speeches.

“I think it’s kinda great,” she said. “We weren’t aware there was a Tea Party movement here in Elk Grove.”

The bus will stop in Manteca Friday before heading to a gun store in Rocklin and a rodeo in Auburn. Organizers said they were undaunted by the small crowd at the Elk Grove event.

“If you look at your history, you’ll see that the masses have never controlled the future of this country,” said Dodge. “It’s always been the few, and that’s what’s going to happen in this next election.”

What do you think of the Tea Party? Will its activists make an impact in the races for California Assembly? Tell us in the comments.