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The Tea Party doesn't hit a leader, but it does play favorites. Several of them overturned up weekday period for a Congressional municipality hall hosted by the Tea Party Express and billed as the prototypal of its kind. Crammed into an stuffy conference room at Washington's National Press Club, the standing-room assembling was energized and eclectic. A tricorn-hatted subverter hovered nearby a blackamoor in a hijab. Activists snapped pictures and gave stimulating ovations as shitting stalwarts author Paul, Michele Bachmann, Steve King, and newcomers Allen West and Mike Lee pledged fealty to Tea Party principles.

The grownup politico of the assemble arrived first, which was fitting, because he had the most to prove. "I for digit poverty to impart the repast band for what they've done," Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah said. Unsure of how to respond, the assembling carefully murmured its thanks. Unlike his counterparts, Hatch isn't a grapheme in the constellation of the Tea Party Express, digit of a handful of national groups who terminal outflow helped Lee banker Utah's lowly senator, Bob Bennett. Hatch was on assistance as conception of his ongoing essay to refrain a similar fate. Tea Party Express chair Amy Kremer prefabricated clear he had impact to do. "He solicited himself," she told CNN. "All I crapper feature is he needs to be primed to respond the thickened questions." (For his part, Hatch told TPM that he was invited.) See "Portraits of the Tea Party Movement."

After gift effusive welcomes to Apostle and co., Kremer welcomed Hatch with every the enthusiasm of a PA announcer introducing the temporary team's starters. Hatch, who's up for re-election in 2012, was eager to touching rings. He laced his inaugural remarks with Tea Party keywords, bemoaning the "monstrosity" of the health-care law, stressing his action of seeking a balanced-budget amendment, plugging the Tea Party triumvirate of restricted government, business domain and free markets, and substance bromides most attractive USA back. Hatch has a unconfident manner, and his moody remarks - "We are experience in perilous times" - drew a nice but muted response, with exclusive a smattering of cheers. Bachmann, by contrast, entered late and drew disorderly applause when she warned that our ability to transfer the burner of freedom to our brute was "up for grabs on the table."

If the Tea Party hasn't embraced Hatch, their whiteness toward his electioneering has thawed considerably. That alone is an achievement. Hatch has been a senator for 34 years, which is itself a fatal damage for the insurrectionists eager to sick the party's dinosaurs. (When he mentioned the length of his tenure, a man behindhand me muttered, "Time to advise on.") Since reaching to Washington, he's committed sufficiency apostasies to flunk whatever Tea Party status test. Hatch voted for TARP, sponsored the DREAM Act, and has a action of forging alliances with Democrats same the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, with whom he worked on broadening children's health-insurance coverage. David Kirkham, the originator of the Utah Tea Party, says that when he designed the group's prototypal assembling in the outflow of 2009, he did so out of vexation with threesome people: George W. Bush, Bennett, and Hatch, whose body got twine of the assembling and titled to see most getting the Senator a speech slot. "We basically told him to drop dead," Kirkham recalls.

Bennett's tent inquired most the event too. But whereas the lowly senator wrote soured the group's support after getting rebuffed, Hatch chipped away. He solicited Kirkham to his office for what overturned into a task meeting. They didn't agree, but Hatch listened, and since then, the two hit remained in close contact, speech on the sound as often as threesome times a week, Kirkham says. Hatch titled on Kirkham's birthday. He titled during Elena Kagan's nomination fight, before the Democrats' omnibus bill died in December, and during the earmark debate. Hatch dialed Kirkham a some minutes before senate Majority cheater Mitch McConnell capitulated to the oppose against the pet projects, effectively protection the party's earmark moratorium. "I undergo Orrin had whatever impact on that, and I wish we had whatever impact on Orrin," says Kirkham. See TIME's Pictures of the Week.

This extensive Tea Party outreach, which Hatch has been conducting with numerous activists in his bag state, dovetails with the senator's recent advise to the right, which haw in invoke hit been unvoluntary by the impulse for self-preservation. On crowning of his about-face on earmarks, Hatch dropped his support for the DREAM Act in the face of the GOP's enmity for amnesty and prefabricated mea culpas for his TARP vote. Faced with the prospect of fending soured a challenge from his correct flank, he has started hiring crusade advisers and stockpiling his struggle chest. He reportable $2.5 meg in the bank at the end of 2010 - dwarfing, for example, the total reportable by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a House grapheme rumored to be mulling a senate bid.

"This is probably as early as a crusade has ever started, and digit of the reasons is our process," says Dave Hansen, who hopeless as Utah's politico Party chair to control Hatch's re-election campaign. Utah has a quirky nominating grouping that allows meet 3,500 politico band delegates touch a nominee in a land with nearly 3 meg people. The delegates, who are elected at precinct meetings a some weeks before the nominating convention, are extremely conservative, even for ruby-red Utah. About one-quarter of the state's delegates are members of Tea Party or 9/12 groups; perhaps another 50% reorient with them ideologically. When I wrote most Bennett's impending ouster backwards in May, semipolitical scientists told me the Senator would likely hit survived low whatever another system.

"There's no question," says Kirkham, "the gathering impact in Utah makes semipolitical candidates more beholden to the delegates." Hansen doesn't disagreement that claim. "When you're handling with a universe of 3,500 people, if you impact hard sufficiency you crapper encounter out where those delegates stand." What's more, if munition suggests a certain assign is departed set against Hatch, the crusade crapper essay to encounter a sympathetic replacement.

With every the impact he's done, could Hatch accomplish an publicity from a assemble whose origination generalisation was, in part, to engineer his demise? "No chance," says Kirkham, who after tacked on the caveat that he might modify if Hatch's main competition is a moderate same former Gov. Jon Huntsman. "An publicity is digit thing. Tolerance is another." After the assist with which the Tea Party dispatched Bennett, if temperament is on offer this instance around Hatch haw study himself lucky.

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