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" FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. \u2014 There was a ruckus at the corner of Orchard Park Boulevard and U.S. 1 on Saturday afternoon, just as there has been a ruckus there every Saturday afternoon since the first weekend of February in 2009. There were American flags and Gadsden flags. There were signs about ther Marxist president, the socialist president, and, yes, the Kenyan president. There was one sign that said, mysteriously, &amp;quot;Sorry, Obama, there will be no race riot.&amp;quot; People drove by, sounded their horns, and waved. People drove by, sounded their horns, and flipped off everyone on the sidewalk. The flags got waved with more vigor when that happened, because this is the ruckus that Danita Kilcullen and her friends have been bringing to this corner every Saturday for the past three years, all building inexorably to this last, wild weekend before, they are certain, the Kenyan Marxist Socialist is going to be routed out of their White House by the forces of... Willard Romney? &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve been here on the corner every single Saturday, and followed up with meetings with speakers, et cetera,&amp;quot; Killcullen told me. &amp;quot;We are the longest running Tea Party in America. Nobody has done what we&amp;#039;ve done. It the Saturday following whenever Rick Santelli called for a Tea Party on the floor of the Chicago stock exchange or wherever he was. We had 120 people here that first Saturday. &amp;quot;We are a billboard. We call ourselves a living billboard. We have made people very aware of the Tea Party and our issues. We are issues-oriented, unlike most other tea parties. Most other tea parties are Taxed Enough Already, and they&amp;#039;re just about that. We cover issues, conservative issues, such as, this past week, I led a group to the diversity committee here. They were trying to install two new Muslim holidays and they were presenting to the school board. We went to that and got the vote put off. That&amp;#039;s the kind of thing we do. We have had speakers at our meetings \u2014 Jesse Phillips from RESTORE, Matt Barber, Pam Gellar from New York. &amp;quot; There is little question that, for all his business-school gloss, Romney needs the people on this corner if he wants to be president. He certainly needs them if he wants to win the state of Florida. These are the people for whose favor he trashed everything he did as governor of Massachusetts. It was to please these people that he so thoroughly embraced positions that he has spent the last month of the campaign gingerly walking back. The Romney campaign was defined on this street corner in Florida, and the corner has been both its salvation and, ultimately, its prison, too. It is on this corner where, for good or ill, the Romney campaign made its stand, as ridiculous as that stand sometimes has made its candidate look. Some of the people on the corner aren&amp;#039;t so sure about the Republican candidate, but Kilcullen is. She&amp;#039;s been a Romneyphile since the last time he ran for president, in 2008. &amp;quot;It was between Mitt and Rick Santorum within the group,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;No problems about us, but everybody here is an individual thinker. We don&amp;#039;t tell people how to think. &amp;quot;I wanted Romney. I thought he was the stronger of the two candidates, that he could go further. Absolutely. I thought he could stand up better against Obama and I still think that he has. We had a little problem with his liberalism as governor in the liberal state of Massachusetts, yes. I was there for him the last time, in 2008. I thought Romney would deliver what we want to see. I understand why he voted in the state of Massachusetts. I do not expect to see that same thing in the White House.&amp;quot; Ed Bender&amp;#039;s still not convinced, and Ed Bender is the purest tea in the teapot that&amp;#039;s bubbling away on the corner. A friendly guy with a long ponytail pouring out of the back of his ballcap, Bender opens up the back of his electrician&amp;#039;s van, and Ed Bender has signs for all Tea Party occasions. He&amp;#039;s got a sign for the tyranny of Obamacare, and a sign about the inevitable second-term gun grab, and even a sign stating his opposition to the blog&amp;#039;s old friend, Agenda 21, the United Nations one-world plot to steal all our golfs. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll tell you something,&amp;quot; Bender said. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t like Romney, either. But I&amp;#039;ll work as hard as I can for him to win. &amp;quot;I mean, I looked into it. He was a globalist before anyone knew what a globalist was. He signed the Global Warming Act when he was governor of Massachusetts. &amp;quot;I mean, before the primaries, when you listed the candidates, his name would have been the one I threw out right at the start. I stood with Herman Cain for a while, even had a bumper sticker on here, &amp;#039;Crackers For Cain.&amp;#039; But then, Romney picked Paul Ryan, and I thought, Okay, I can cast a vote for him as vice-president. I can vote for that ticket.&amp;quot;  Over on the corner, another flourish of horns erupted. Ed Bender pulled another sign out of the back of his van. If you rooted around in there long enough, you maybe could find Willard Romney&amp;#039;s soul. --Stay tuned to The Politics Blog all weekend long on RSS and Twitter for live coverage from Florida, and all next week from writing from every single swing state.... "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a16560/florida-tea-party-for-mitt-romney-2012-14402525/>