TAKING ON STENY:

Candidate woos blacks to tea party (MARIN COGAN, 4/13/10, Politico)

[Charles] Lollar, a Marine Corps Reserve major running in the 5th District’s Republican primary, is a mix of conservative candidate (“Everybody can’t go to college. If all of us go to college, who is paying the tuition? If all of us work for government, who is paying the paychecks?”) and motivational speaker (“The only difference between someone very successful and someone not successful is that that person who is successful got up one more time.”).

But Lollar has one more unique attribute: He’s an African-American tea partier.

Lollar regales the college kids with the travails of his youth, nuggets of inspiration about America’s Jeffersonian democracy and a line about voter frustration that sounds oddly reminiscent of Barack Obama.

“Our country is greater than race relations that aren’t going the way they should be. They’re greater than partisan politics that are used to bicker and separate. They’re greater than this tea party versus Republican Party versus Democrat Party — that’s not our nation. Our nation is one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”