Both political parties are taking tea party activists seriously and are wary of offending them – if they are not already actively wooing them for state races this fall. Just look at the governor’s election in Ohio. Republican gubernatorial candidate John Kasich openly touts his tea party credentials in his bid to defeat incumbent Democrat Ted Strickland. “I think I was in the tea party before there was a tea party,” Kasich famously told a Columbus crowd earlier this year. “This is a real movement with a real message about people’s frustrations by broken promises that leaders on both sides of the aisle would be foolish to ignore,” he went on to write in a blog posting.
