Sally Sinacore, a retired paralegal from Palatine, came to the Daley Plaza Tea Party rally wrapped in an American flag that had draped the coffin of her father, a World War II veteran.
“I’m here because I want us to become fiscally more conservative. We cannot take this heavy spending any longer,” the 73-year-old woman said. “This is my country, and I love it to death.”
At a recent Tea Party rally in Springfield, retired state worker Ed White held a homemade sign with this handwritten message:
“Constitution strictly. Remove all pinkos, Marxists. Down with progressive liberals who raise taxes, drain the treasury and steal our freedoms.”
“The truth of it is,” the former, 69-year-old state worker and ex-Republican said, “I’m fed up.”
These two faces represent the fledgling Tea Party movement in Illinois. It is driven by disdain for deficit-riddled government, a love for Fox Television personality Glenn Beck and a hatred of if not the man, at least the policies of — President Obama, who ascended to the White House use last year with 3.3 million Illinois votes.
The Tea Partiers have drawn significant positive attention in a media that many believe is against them. About 2,000 crowded Daley Plaza on Thursday to commemorate — or curse — the day when Americans’ federal tax bills were due. Smaller rallies occurred in Naperville, Joliet and a handful of other Chicago area towns.
‘People I’d hire’
The Tea Party movement has drawn comparisons to H. Ross Perot’s Reform Party movement, which netted Perot more than 840,000 Illinois votes in the 1992 presidential election and was driven by disillusionment with the organized political parties.
However, the Tea Party in Illinois is not an organized or an established political force and certainly not yet on par with Perot’s anti-establishment movement. It is a loose confederation of ad hoc groups with no clear figureheads nor significant political victories yet, beyond its ability to rally its faithful.
“I’ve been particularly impressed with people at Tea Parties. I describe them as people I’d hire for my company. They’re entrepreneurs. They’re people who go to church. They’re people who have families and are engaged in their communities. They’re people I’d have baby-sit my children. And they’re people who believe in the founding principles of the country,” said former GOP gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrzejewski.
With Tea Party help, Andrzejewski finished fourth in the GOP’s six-way primary with 111,030 votes. He’s spoken at recent rallies.
Andrzejewski estimated the movement has at least 50,000 members in Illinois, though there is no way to validate that figure.
His Illinois-centric demographic profile of the Tea Party movement bears striking similarities to Tea Partiers across the country in a poll published last week by the New York Times and CBS News. The national survey of 1,510 Tea Party supporters found:
• 88 percent disapproved of Obama’s job performance.
• A plurality regarded former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich as the most admired political figure in the country, followed by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
• 52 percent believe “too much has been made” about problems facing black America.
• 51 percent doubt global warming will have a serious impact.
• 63 percent get their news from Fox News Channel, and 59 percent hold a favorable opinion of Fox personality Glenn Beck.
‘Yes, they are mostly white’
The majority of respondents also identified themselves as white, men, mostly middle- or upper-middle class with family incomes of $50,000 or more, the poll found. They were mostly Protestants and regular churchgoers, 45 or older, and “angry” about how things are going in Washington.
“The media have tried to portray the Tea Party as racists and extremists, but you can see we have all sorts of people here — young, old. Yes, they are mostly white, but you can see some African Americans,” said Deirdre Sandquist, a retired Cook County probation officer, who attended Thursday’s downtown rally.
Her sign read: “Keep the government out of our banks, our businesses and our bedrooms.”
Like some others who are part of this drive to turn government upside down, Sandquist survives on a government pension — a fact that could be viewed as ironic given the venom some in the group spew toward the state and federal governments. Sandquist noted her 3 percent cost of living adjustment in her county retirement check “is usually eaten up by increased health care costs.”
Despite an epic tax battle that has unfolded this spring in Springfield, the Tea Party has been largely absent from that fight. Andrzejewski has pushed for a “forensic audit” to root out wasteful spending in lieu of the tax increase Gov. Quinn favors, but there has been no Tea Party rallying in the rotunda of the Capitol.
Quinn, who likes pointing out he was born on the 175th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and once encouraged Illinoisans to mail tea bags to former Gov. James Thompson to protest a 1979 legislative pay increase, called Thursday’s Tea Party rally in Chicago “a good thing.”
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