Mark Williams has a problem.
Williams is chairman of Tea Party Express, a leading organization in the Tea Party movement. The Express is operated by Our Country Deserves Better PAC, which is run out of the offices of Russo Marsh & Rogers, a Republican-affiliated strategy firm. Sal Russo, OCBD’s chief strategist, has been a Republican strategist since Ronald Reagan’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign. Even though other Tea Party groups consider the Express an Astroturf organzation, implying that it has corporate backers and lacks grass-roots support, it has organized three successful cross-country bus tours to oppose the policies of the Obama administration.
These tours garnered heavy media attention from Fox News and, eventually, CNN, and its most recent tour featured two appearances by Sarah Palin, one of which was dubbed the Conservative Woodstock. Sounds good. So what’s the problem?
The problem, according to the rest of the Tea Party movement, is Mark Williams.
Williams has referred to President Obama as a Nazi, a half-white racist, a half-black racist and an Indonesian Muslim turned welfare fraud. In turn, much of the Tea Party movement has referred to Williams as a racist, a bigot, amoral, lacking any semblance of a conscience, deceitful, selfish, conniving, the Michael Steele of the Tea Party and, perhaps worst of all, a liberal.
Williams hasn’t done much to help his image. Far from it. In May of 1997, he told an Idaho newspaper that his job in talk radio was "to make people listen so the ad people can charge advertisers a lot of money so I won’t have to kill my own food or lift anything heavy."
The very next month he told the Albany Times Union, "What I do better than most is figure out which way the parade is marching, dash to the front and say, ‘Follow me.’ Nobody wants to listen to me rant and rave, they want to hear some kind of conflict."
Williams’s career in radio stretches back more than 20 years. According to the New York Times, Williams worked in Arizona in 1987, where he used his radio pulpit to lobby for the recall, impeachment and arraignment of Arizona’s Republican Governor Evan Mecham, who was successfully impeached on February 27, 1988. Mecham was the first governor to face impeachment, recall and indictment all at the same time, and also is responsible for eliminating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day as a holiday in Arizona.
In October of 1988, the staff of XTRA-AM in San Diego stumbled across a memo to the staff of rival station KSDO-FM, written to inform them about changes in the XTRA lineup, specifically the addition of one Mark Williams. In a section called ‘Dirty Tricks’, the memo referred to Williams as "the Donald Segretti of talk radio." Segretti, a member of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) pled guilty to and served four months in jail for a campaign of dirty tricks. One of these tricks was the forging of a letter from Democratic presidential candidate Edmund Muskie’s letterhead falsely alleging that fellow Democratic senator Henry Jackson had an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old. Segretti referred to his techniques as "ratfucking." The memo quoted an unidentified source from Phoenix, Arizona, where Williams had last worked, claimed Williams was "not extraordinarily bright or talented and capable only of going for the jugular," with "a very big ego which gets in the way of good taste and judgment on the air." The memo quotes Bob Christopher, program director of KTAR-AM in Phoenix, as saying, "I’m amazed Williams was able to get a job." CONTINUED
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