An outside spending group affiliated with the conservative Tea Party movement is targeting long-time Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch in 2012 for not being conservative enough.

FreedomWorks for America is a so-called “super PAC,” meaning it can accept unlimited donations from corporations, individuals and labor unions and spend the funds on advertising and other expenditures aimed at electing or defeating a candidate.   On Tuesday, the group reported to the Federal Election Commission that it spent more than $43,000 on expenditures to oppose Hatch, including payments to a Utah communications firm for research, a D.C.-based polling firm, an Oregon-based yard sign manufacturer and a North Carolina online services company.

Hecker says his group is working to provide Utah-based activists with the resources they need to defeat Hatch, including polling, focus groups, online phone-banking, direct mail, door-hangers, and palm cards. Read more at www.tucsonsentinel.com

Washington • Sen. Orrin Hatch and his campaign team have heard enough from their most vocal critics and are fighting back, lambasting the leaders of FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth as hypocrites and political has-beens struggling to remain relevant.

Their latest jabs focus on the debt-limit debate that consumed Washington in recent weeks. FreedomWorks created mailers and the Club released a television ad slamming Hatch for repeatedly voting to increase the amount of money the nation can borrow, which he has supported 16 times since joining the Senate in 1977.

But Hatch’s staffers, led by campaign manager Dave Hansen, say they won’t lie back and take such attacks, particularly from people who have long voting records of their own. FreedomWorks Chairman Dick Armey voted at least twice to raise the debt ceiling as a former House majority leader, and Club for Growth President Chris Chocola did so three times as a congressman from Indiana. Read more at www.sltrib.com

Despite his overtures to the tea party movement this year, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate, Orrin Hatch of Utah, still hasn’t won over voters like Darcy Van Orden, who hasn’t forgotten his moderate past and wants the National Republican Senatorial Committee to pull its support for him in 2012.

Van Orden joined about 20 Utahns and a couple dozen more activists in front of the NRSC headquarters on Monday, in a protest organized by FreedomWorks, a Washington-based tea party organizing group.

“It’s time for him to go home and retire,” said Van Orden, who is from Davis County, Utah. “Isn’t 36 years enough? He truly hasn’t been a proponent of liberty.” Read more at www.politico.com

Conservative PAC FreedomWorks, a prominent Tea Party group chaired by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, is targeting Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch in the 2012 Senate race.

The group, arguing Hatch has insufficiently conservative economic views, is launching the so-called “Retire Orrin Hatch” campaign at Utah’s Republican Convention on Saturday.

“It’s clear that Senator Hatch is trying to capitalize on the popularity of the Tea Party movement by reinventing himself as a fiscal conservative,” said Russ Walker, Vice President of Political and Grassroots Campaigns for FreedomWorks PAC, in a statement. “But his recent rhetoric and actions in favor of limited government simply do not erase decades of bad votes, costing taxpayers trillions of dollars. Indeed Hatch’s body of work proves he cannot be trusted to consistently adhere to a fiscally conservative agenda, and possible primary challengers like Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-3, UT)give conservatives in Utah and around the country a great opportunity to trade up.” Read more at www.cbsnews.com

Orrin Hatch is conservative by almost any measure, but these days that’s not enough to shield him from the right. There’s a credible challenger in the wings and a real possibility that the Utah senator could become the first establishment casualty of the 2012 season.

The Tea Party movement first demonstrated its clout last year by knocking off Hatch’s Utah colleague, Bob Bennett. Now the movement’s activists have served notice that they are displeased with several big-name Republican senators. Hatch, like most of them, is cultivating the grassroots, moving rightward, and hoping to fend off a serious primary challenger.

It’s already too late for that in Indiana, where state treasurer Richard Mourdock is taking on Richard Lugar. And it may be too late for Hatch, who could well face Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a self-described “definite maybe” who will decide after Labor Day whether to run. Others drawing conservative scrutiny and complaints are Olympia Snowe of Maine, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, and Bob Corker of Tennessee. Read more at www.csmonitor.com

While Hatch has attended tea party events and the Conservative Political Action Conference in an attempt to prove his conservative bona fides, a defiant Lugar pokes fingers in the eyes of his critics on the right.

“I’ve got to say, ‘Get real.’ I hear tea party or other people talking about they were against START. I said, ‘Well, now, hang on here,’” the 78-year-old Lugar told a Fort Wayne television station, referring to tea party opposition to the START nuclear arms agreement, which he recently helped steer toward passage.

Other than a two-hour meeting with tea party leaders in Indianapolis in December, Lugar has shown little sign of recalibrating his support for TARP, the DREAM Act, President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominees or anything else that has the conservative grass roots roiling. Read more at www.politico.com

WASHINGTON (AP) — What does a longtime Republican senator with a national reputation for working well with Democrats do in the face of a potentially career-ending tea party challenge?

If you’re Richard Lugar of Indiana, you tell them to “get real.”

If you’re Olympia Snowe of Maine, you fight off the “Snowe Removal” effort by making key alliances with tea party activists and highlighting your record of fiscal conservatism.

And if you’re Orrin Hatch of Utah, you woo them.

It’s clear the tea party — not even 2 years old — isn’t going away anytime soon after huge success in last fall’s congressional elections. Dozens of its favorite candidates — Republicans who champion limited government and sharply reduced spending — won House and Senate races. Now, the tea party is empowered and turning its attention to vulnerable Republicans up for re-election in 2012. How the three GOP senators handle the tea party threat will go a long way to determining whether the outcome mirrors that of 2010. Read more at www.google.com

I wonder what his strategy is. Orrin Hatch is so nervous about a tea-party primary challenge that he’s now inviting himself to TP town-hall meetings to gladhand people. Lugar, meanwhile, is practically daring them to bring it on.

Only one thing is certain, my friends: If he wins in the primary, he’s a lock to keynote RINOcon.

Note how, near the end of the clip, he refuses to rule out an independent run. Indiana has a “sore-loser law,” so he won’t be able to pull a Lieberman and run as an indie if he competes in the GOP primary and ends up losing. He’d have to pull out of the primary and turn independent beforehand, a la Charlie Crist. He probably couldn’t pull a Murkowski either and win via a write-in campaign: Granted, after 30+ years in the Senate, his name recognition in Indiana is sky-high, but Murky had the advantage of running in a state with a tiny electorate, making a critical mass of write-in votes easier to achieve. So presumably, if early polls show a tight primary shaping up, he’ll quit the party ASAP and recast himself as an independent in order to give the public time to get comfortable with the idea and make it seem less like he’s being opportunistic. Read more at hotair.com

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, could face an election challenge next year from a Tea Party candidate and others on his right. CAPTION By Win McNamee, Getty Images Is Sen. Orrin Hatch as “good as it gets” when it comes to Republicans?

The Club for Growth, a group of fiscal conservatives, doesn’t think so and is taking exception to a Tea Party leader who said the Utah senator is a conservative in the mold of Ronald Reagan and “as good as it gets.”

Meanwhile, Tea Party Express chairwoman Amy Kremer has clarified the comments made yesterday by the group’s strategist Sal Russo, who also said his friend Hatch is “an original Tea Partier.” Read more at content.usatoday.com