I had a similar issue when I was circulating the MCHF petition around my town.

Democrats didn't like it that someone even had the audacity to try to circulate that petition. Even moreso that I was doing it by myself.

I was shadowed. Untoward comments made at me. And people going to houses further down the block ahead of me to "educate" the people about what I was doing.

Needless to say, going door-to-door in my own town didn't pay off as well as I would've liked.

There were other times when local pols got a little too full of themselves and basically told the residents they they purportedly serve to "Go to Hell" in no uncertain terms. They didn't want their input.

They were elected to make decisions. They will be making the final call.

Tea party activists are seen as too confrontational to compromise.  We fall outside the mainstream, hate progress, and yearn for the days when choiceless women did nothing but bake pies and make babies.  No wonder we are hated.  

We hear this sort of drivel on every network news broadcast, on every cable news network (save sometimes FOX), on NPR, read it in nearly every major newspaper across America, and have to listen to it from both Democrat and establishment Republican leaders alike whenever we're unfortunate enough to have one of them find a microphone.  As comrade Lenin said so many years ago, repeat a falsehood often enough and soon it becomes the truth.

Barbara Bush in a recent interview asked "when did compromise become a dirty word?"  She was lamenting the polar opposites of both political parties, harsh rhetoric, and was largely criticizing the uncompromising desires of the tea party.  (For Barbara's sake I'll clarify something...compromise is not a dirty word.  The recession caused by her husband's compromise on his "no new taxes" pledge was downright filthy.)

Making compromises has never been the problem of conservatives--our problem has been that those for whom we have voted in the past too often already represent a compromise.  In fact, the greatest single motivation I had for becoming more politically active was the selection of John McCain to represent conservatives in the last presidential election.  Don't tell me that having that milquetoast bureaucrat sitting atop the ballot wasn't a huge compromise of conservative principles.

Conservatives are asked by the GOP to compromise at the ballot box and then the candidate we poorly select is asked to compromise further for the children or the elderly or the environment or for reproductive rights.  This is how we end up with a $15 trillion debt--electing compromise candidates who make very stern faces while compromising even farther from a foundation built on shifting sand.