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In the latest sign of rancor in Tea Party circles, a convention billed as an effort to bring together bourgeois activists from across the country is actuality attacked by some leading Tea Partiers as inauthentic, too tied to the GOP, and — at $549 per head — too expensive for the working Americans the movement aspires to represent.

According to a message on theconvention’s website, the event “is aimed at bringing the Tea Party Movement leaders together from about the nation.” But organizers are a long way from unifying the awfully fractious movement. The National Tea Party Convention, scheduled for early February in Nashville, grabbed headlinesafter announcing that Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann would appear as speakers, Palin as the keynote.

“Most people in our movement can’t afford annihilation like that,” Meckler told TPMmuckraker, referring to the price tag. Tea Party Patriots, which helped put together a September rally that drew tens of thousands to Washington, view the confab — which is actuality captivated at Nashville’s swank Opryland Gaylord auberge — as the “usurpation of a grassroots movement,” according to Mark Meckler, a leader of the group. “So it’s really not aimed at the average grassroots person.”.

Indeed, one bourgeois activist who has organized Tea Parties with several local groups told TPMmuckraker that alike though she lives in the Nashville area, she still can’t afford to attend. “I’m not gonna throw my money about for that.”. “To me its not worth it,” said Toni, who blogs at Bear Creek Ledger and asked that her last name not be used.

Phillips, a former local prosecutor, didn’t respond to several requests for comment, but he told that the convention was intended to make a profit so that Tea Party Nation can “funnel money back into bourgeois causes” through a 527 group it plans to set up. The convention’s prime organizer, Nashville bent defense lawyer Judson Phillips, founded Tea Party Nation, a for-profit aggregation that runs a networking site for activists.

Mark Skoda, another of the activists abaft the event, told TPMmuckraker that the fees were required to pay for the event’s costs. He added that Tea Party Nation had urged volunteers to accept their local Tea Party group sponsor their attendance — an idea that Stublen derided as inconsistent with the concept of claimed fiscal responsibility that the movement professes. Skoda declined to comment on Palin’s fee, citing “the non-disclosure of speakers contracts.”.

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