What's the Secret at the Tea Party?

So does the Lynchburg Tea Party really have a hidden agenda, as some have suggested?

That’s the inevitable conclusion one reaches after reading last week’s story that tea party members will meet Thursday behind closed doors with two Republican candidates running for Congress. The media, with all its clumsy recording devices such as notebooks and a pen, have been excluded from the monthly meeting.

It’s surprising, in fact, that state Sen. Robert Hurt, the Republican candidate for the Fifth District seat in Congress, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the incumbent Fifth District congressmen, would agree to speak to such a meeting closed to the media. Both are public servants and both are running for public positions that deserve public scrutiny. Yet, neither candidate objected to excluding the media from the meeting.

What exactly is the tea party’s problem with allowing the media to sit in on the proceedings at the Monte Carlo restaurant? Are there some secrets that Hurt and Goodlatte want to share with the members — or that the members want to share with the Republican candidates? Who knows?

Mark Lloyd, chairman of the Lynchburg Tea Party, offered the excuse that the media could create a “circus” atmosphere at the meeting, something that some tea party members find distasteful.

“At the request of several of our members, they would like to have a personal conversation with the candidates,” he said. “It will be a more personal, one-on-one type of setting without the lights and microphones,” he added.

Ah, so it’s the broadcast media that’s the problem? The television folks do need light for their cameras. Such light, apparently, is something the tea party members find objectionable in their proceedings and deliberations.

The meeting will be limited to the Lynchburg Tea Party’s registered members plus its “regular participants” who have shown up for most of its meetings, Lloyd said.

The May 6 meeting drew some 50 people to the restaurant, along with cameras from two television stations and a newspaper reporter. Seven candidates who were seeking the GOP nomination to oppose Rep. Tom Perriello spoke during the May meeting, along with former Rep. Virgil Goode.

At that meeting, like the one coming up Thursday, the candidates for public office offered their views on matters of interest to the public. The media was there to report those views in the interest of keeping the public informed.

“It was elbow-to-elbow in that room, and nobody could see anything because of the cameras and all that,” Lloyd said. “It was the distraction of the media” that caused regular tea party members to demand that the media be excluded from the August meeting, he added.

Democracy gets a little messy at times, especially the way it’s conducted in the United States. The media often take seriously their responsibility to report to the public what public officials are saying and doing. And those cameras and lights do create distractions on occasion. Anyone who has attended a presidential campaign event knows all about that.

But do those distractions mean the public should be excluded from proceedings on the campaign trail? Certainly not. It is one of the ways the public learns about where the candidates stand on the various issues that surround the current campaigns for Congress.

By excluding the media from Thursday’s meeting, the Lynchburg Tea Party is serving only itself. But maybe that’s what this third party political movement is all about.