Give Us Liberty (12 page)

Bad strategy, Madam Speaker.

I was stunned by the number of people
⁸
who were already there and more were streaming in. My excitement welled as I looked out over all these people. The energy and patriotism was amazing. There were flags everywhere, U.S. flags, Gadsden flags and military flags in all sizes. And despite the size of the crowd these protesters were polite and respectful. No pushing or shoving. I was also surprised at the respect for personal space. This was truly a peaceful protest . . . these were my people! I could never have imagined this many people would be here.

—B
ILL
H
EERING
, T
ERRYVILLE
, C
ONNECTICUT

The
London
Daily Mail
reported “as many as one million people
⁹
flooded into Washington for a massive rally organised by conservatives.”

The size of the crowd—by far the biggest protest since the president took office in January—shocked the White House. Demonstrators massed outside Capitol Hill after marching down Pennsylvania Avenue waving placards and chanting “Enough, enough!” The focus of much of the anger was the president's so-called Obamacare plan to overhaul the U.S. health system. Demonstrators waved U.S. flags and held signs reading go green recycle congress and i'm not your atm. The protest on Saturday came as Mr. Obama took his campaign for health reforms on the road, making his argument to a rally of 15,000 supporters in Minneapolis.

NBC News estimated “hundreds of thousands.” The silliest estimate came from MSNBC's David Schuster, who condescendingly tweeted that “Freedomworks [
sic
] says their dc demonstration attracted 30,000 people
¹⁰
. Park police official says that is being ‘generous.' ” We, of course, never said that.

Our sound system, fully capable of reaching well over one hundred thousand people, was completely insufficient. According to the
Washington Post,
“Authorities in the District
¹¹
do not give official crowd estimates, but Saturday's throng appeared to number in the many tens of thousands. A sea of people surrounded the Capitol reflecting pool, spilling across Third Street and along the Mall. The sound system did not reach far enough for people at the edges of the rally to hear the speakers onstage.”

We were caught off guard by the whole numbers game. The Park Police, who privately told countless participants that the crowd was easily over a million strong, no longer released official estimates after the Million Man March sponsors sued over an estimate that fell far short of the official name of their event. We do know that the peaceful demonstrators jammed Pennsylvania Avenue, seven lanes across, down to the Capitol, 1.2 miles in length, for more than three hours. The arriving crowd swamped the West Front of the Capitol and flooded down the National Mall and across various side streets—reaching to Independence Avenue to the south of the Capitol, and to Constitution Avenue to the north.

A grassroots movement that stands athwart Independence and Constitution seems just about right when you stop and think about it.

Charlie Martin, science and technology editor for Pajamas Media, did a crowd analysis that used time-lapse video footage to estimate the number of people who marched. The video shows the entire seven lanes of Pennsylvania Avenue filled along the entire path of the march for three full hours. Based on a very conservative pace and distribution, he concluded: “probably well more than 850,000 in the crowd
¹²
. Which is a lot of people.”

This, of course, does not include those who skipped the march and went straight to the stage for the rally. Then consider reports that traffic into the city was gridlocked. “We overheard people talking
¹³
on their cell phones with friends in the outlying areas and learned that several roads and bridges were jammed for hours because of the high number of people trying to get to the rally,” said marcher Ron Kaehr of Albuquerque, New Mexico. “From our vantage point at this time, the crowd stretched as far south as you could see. It was unbelievable! That's when I realized how large the crowd had grown.”

The
New York Times
reported that “the magnitude of the rally took the authorities by surprise, with throngs of people streaming from the White House to Capitol Hill for more than three hours.”

Conservatively, you can say that at least one million people showed up for the Taxpayer March on Washington on September 12, 2009.

A D
AY TO
R
EMEMBER

T
HAT MORNING WE WALKED
1.2 miles from Freedom Plaza to FreedomWorks stage on the West Front of the Capitol surrounded by indisputable evidence that Americans uniquely treasure their freedoms and will rise up to protect them no matter the cost or inconvenience.

I will be fifty-one years old
¹⁴
in October 2009 and drove 1,550 miles roundtrip to the D.C. Tea Party. This was my second protest in fifty-one years with the first being the Huntsville, Alabama, Tea Party on April 15 of this year. I found that my reasons for going were the same of most of the people I spoke with. First, we were there for our children's future and secondly, to save our country.

—M
IKE GRUBER
, M
ADISON
, A
LABAMA

As we approached the Newseum at Sixth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, with its massive, seventy-four-foot-high Royal Pink marble facade carved with the forty-five words of the First Amendment to the Constitution, people began to read it aloud, in unison:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Some cried, and some cheered. Everyone smiled.

That so many people chose to come directly to the seat of our federal government—putting their lives on hold and adding to the strain on their family budgets—is remarkable enough. What was truly extraordinary was their unscripted, uncoached, and unrehearsed unity of purpose. We heard it over and over again in our conversations with individuals who made up this sea of fellow protesters: “I have never done anything like this before. But I have to do something; our government is out of control!”

Many in the media and liberal legislators alike try to dismiss these folks as simpleminded protesters opposed to taxes. In reality, they demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of economics: The real rate of taxation, as Milton Friedman argued, is the rate of spending. Government spending above current revenues must be paid for with borrowed money to be paid for with higher taxes in the future or government expansion of the money supply, which can only debase the currency and distort relative prices through inflation, making everyone poorer. Some had never heard of Friedman or Ludwig von Mises, or F. A. Hayek. But if you hold a job, manage a family budget, or run a small business, you just know these things. It's common sense. Imagine having even a fraction of this simple economic wisdom seated in the halls of government.

The huge, polite, focused crowd was like a fresh wind;
¹⁵
9/12 has changed me. I can no longer hide in my lovely little life and simply hope for the best. I can no longer hope my representatives and senators are looking out for our best interests. Freedom has always come at a price and to think we don't need to be vigilant and speak with our votes is lazy and naive.

—J
ENNIFER
G
ALENA
, O
HIO

Chapter 7
Why We Must Take Over the Republican Party

Both parties seem to be
¹
more for big government. . . . The Republicans need to learn that the people they are running [for office] do not represent the views of the people.

—S
ILVAN
J
OHNSON
, F
ULTON
, N
EW
Y
ORK

E
VER SINCE
R
ICK
S
ANTELLI
inadvertently branded this grassroots citizen rebellion—fueled by disappointment in both the Republican and Democrat parties—the media has increasingly confused the common noun usage of the words “tea party” with the proper noun Tea Party. “Citizens gathered in downtown St. Louis at noon today to hold a tea party” soon gave way to “the Tea Party is proving to be a political thorn in the side of Democrats attempting to sell their health care legislation to reluctant members of Congress.”

In many ways, it was a compliment to the fine men and women who had toiled for so long only to be dismissed by many in the media as phony, or worse, as the useful idiots of some shadowy syndicate of well-heeled corporate interests. At some point, the “Astroturf” caricature was abandoned by serious publications. Real reporters left their desks, actually went to some town hall meetings, and discovered, contrary to the Democratic National Committee's talking points, that these Tea Party folks were real, flesh-and-blood Americans.

Say what you want about their concerns, the Tea Partiers were energized and motivated and they were getting organized. That made them politically relevant. Political outcomes are almost always defined by the relative energy of various voting constituencies. If government decisions are defined by who shows up to advocate the passage or defeat of legislation, it is equally true that the voters who are motivated to show up on Election Day define who sits in public office and which party controls Congress.

There was growing recognition that the millions of people who self-identified with the Tea Party movement represented a potentially significant political force that needed to be covered by the press. Millions more people were starting to sympathize with the cause of fiscal responsibility that the Tea Partiers had brought to the forefront of the public conversation.

At some point, in the media's eyes, Tea Partiers became the Tea Party.

It is understandable why they got it wrong. Everybody gets it wrong. The Tea Party movement is decentralized. It is leaderless. No particular nominee, no executive director, no national chairman is in charge of this party. How this all works is literally lost on the political cognoscenti of the Beltway establishment. They simply cannot imagine something happening without the direct involvement of a designated authority, a boss, or, put in the currently stylish Washington parlance, a czar.

These, by the way, tended to be the same bright bulbs who so passionately argued that our country would simply stop manufacturing American-made automobiles unless the federal government took over General Motors and put the very best bureaucrats in charge of the business. Can't possibly make cars without a car czar, right? Have they ever wondered how on earth that loaf of bread ended up on the kitchen counter? Did the bread czar allocate just the perfect number of loaves in your sector to perfectly anticipate and meet your expected demand for a sandwich?

How could something that wasn't centrally controlled unfold in such an organized way?

P
RINCIPLES
, N
OT
P
OLITICS

T
HE MEDIA NEEDED TO
find a category to categorize us with; a box to box us into. They needed a neat and tidy story line that would fit the traditional partisan narrative of Us vs. Them, Left vs. Right, or Republican vs. Democrat. So they settled on Tea Party.

Say what you want about political parties, they are always intellectually and morally inferior to principles and good ideas. The sole purpose of a political party is to get candidates elected. Too often the candidate of one party could have just as easily run on the opposing political party's ticket. Political parties are empty vessels, adrift on tides that can shift with the winds of political opinion.

Principles, on the other hand, are different. Good ideas stand up to scrutiny. The right principles and the best ideas pass the test of time. They do not change based on the latest public opinion polling; they cannot be twisted like those dials on the machines experts use to measure the emotional intensity of a person's response during a focus group.

The principles of individual freedom, fiscal responsibility, and constitutionally limited government are what define the Tea Party ethos. They bind us as a social movement. And that makes the Tea Party better than a political party—something that can sustain itself the day after the first Tuesday in November, when all of the yard signs come down and all of the campaign volunteers go back to the daily routines of their normal lives. The Tea Party is a far more potent force for social change in America because it will sustain itself beyond the next candidate's election.

Be that as it may, when this band of citizen activists started to flex its collective grassroots muscle, the media's narrative shifted from characterizing the movement as a series of isolated events to describing it as a formidable—and potentially formal—political organization. They were searching for a measure to judge us. How many dollars are you raising? Who will run on the Tea Party ticket? When is the Tea Party convention?

The Democrats certainly hoped that this highly motivated constituency would create a third party that could split the more independent-minded fiscal responsibility vote from the Republican base. This would be of immeasurable help to swing Democrats facing difficult reelections. Embattled Democratic incumbents—forced to defend their votes for bigger budget deficits, more government debt on future generations, and an astronomically expensive and highly unpopular health care takeover—might eke past a majority of voter opposition if those votes were split between the Republican nominee and a third-party candidate supported by Tea Partiers.

Democratic political operatives looking for a silver lining in all of the public discontent consoled their ranks with the argument that this grassroots revolt was fueled by anger targeting all incumbent politicians equally. A February 2010 CNN poll seemed to bolster this line of reasoning. That survey found voter discontent was far greater than even 1994, when nine million new voters swarmed the polls and gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in forty years.

“This is not a good year
²
to be an incumbent, regardless of which party you belong to,” said CNN polling director Keating Holland. “Voters seem equally angry at both Republicans and Democrats this year.”

This might have been wishful thinking by panicked Democrats, but there was a faction of the Tea Party population who wanted to throw all of the bums out of office, hose down the Capitol, and start over with a clean slate. The notion had a certain emotional appeal and made for many of the most clever signs at the protests, tea parties, and marches.
WE ARE HERE TO GIVE CORRUPT PUBLIC SERVANTS END-OF-JOB COUNSELING
³
, one sign read.
POLITICIANS ARE LIKE DIAPERS
, said a placard held by a woman dressed up like Betsy Ross,
THEY BOTH NEED CHANGING REGULARLY AND FOR THE SAME REASON
.

It was tempting to dump the lot of them, but it didn't make good sense to try to change things that way. After all, there were legislators who had fought for good policy and against bad policy even when it was considered political suicide to do so. Representative Mike Pence, for one, had risen in lonely dissent against his party's president and Treasury Secretary Paulson on the question of the Wall Street bailout in the fall of 2008. Many establishment Republican types pronounced that Pence's political apostasy would cost him his career. But for one congressman from Indiana—and for a number of his colleagues in the House and Senate who joined him to vote nay—that vote was defining. That vote was about principle, not party. Mike Pence would later become the House Republican Conference chairman, proving our oft-said adage: Good policy is good politics.

W
HERE THE
R
UBBER
M
EETS THE
R
OAD

W
HILE PLANNING THE 9/12
Taxpayer March on Washington, we fought to include a select few elected officials including Rep. Pence, Sen. Jim DeMint, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, and Rep. Tom Price to address the crowd. Some felt that the movement needed to avoid any affiliation with elected politicians, but we argued passionately that this grassroots army for freedom eventually needed to connect with like-minded individuals who actually held office. They may be hard to find, but there are principled public servants who will fight the good fight. These were the men and women we would need on the inside, in the legislature, writing the laws that would govern the next generation.

We have always argued that we needed to connect the energy of the Tea Party movement with a tangible strategy that would translate protests into policy, action into change. It was the same with politics. How would the Tea Party principles manifest themselves into more votes for the right candidates and tangible political outcomes? We needed to turn votes into victories.

FreedomWorks was hardly the only voice on this topic. Mark Tapscott, editorial page editor for the
Washington Examiner
, argued in September 2009 that Tea Partiers should “be figuring out how to channel this tidal shift in American public opinion
⁴
into concrete results in next year's congressional elections” and that the “movement must identify and encourage like-minded candidates in both major parties.” Erick Erickson of the conservative blog Red State echoed the sentiment, advising readers to “sign up for your local political party
⁵
, encourage and support like-minded candidates and throw the kleptocrats out of office.”

One evening on MSNBC's
Hardball,
Matt was asked by host Chris Matthews, “Would you guys knock off an incumbent Republican
⁶
by going third party, because you know how the vote splits?” The prospect sounded tempting—after all, we were defined by good ideas, not by party affiliation. And every Tea Partier harbored deep disillusionment. The Republican Party was on double probation with all of us for its central role in expanding government in recent years.

Republican In Name Only (RINO) had become the label that disenfranchised Republican voters—the ones who had expected from their elected officials more than just party affiliation—used to tag politicians who talked the talk but seldom missed a vote to expand government spending.

Matthews was asking a good question: If we knew we could take a seat in Congress by running our Tea Party candidate, would we do it? He knew the right button to push, and he was probably hoping we would take the bait.

The answer was no.

F
IRST
, S
ECOND, AND
L
AST
P
LACE

I
N THE REAL WORLD,
third parties don't win very often. And if you aren't elected to hold public office, you will never get a chance to enact laws that could benefit the fiscal futures of our children and our grandchildren. Part of the reason for this is our restrictive campaign finance laws. It is very difficult to raise the money needed to run a competitive election in the artificially small amounts dictated by the Federal Election Commission. It's much easier to start a successful campaign with a network of donors and a political party apparatus.

In practice this means that the few third-party candidates who do rise to national prominence tend to be eccentric billionaires on very expensive ego trips. Remember Ross Perot? In today's dollars, he spent almost $100 million of his own wealth, but he ultimately received zero Electoral College votes in his quixotic 1992 bid for the presidency. He did take 19 percent of the popular vote, making him the most successful third-party candidate since 1912. That was the year popular former president Theodore Roosevelt took a losing 27 percent of the vote as a Progressive Party candidate.

Like it or not, the two major parties currently control almost every single elected office in the country, from president to Congress, state legislatures, city councils, and town assemblies. We can safely predict, without fear of embarrassment, that either Republicans or Democrats will control the U.S. House and Senate in 2010 and the White House in 2012. Even when third-party candidates win—like former socialist Bernie Sanders from Vermont and former Democrat Joe Lieberman from Connecticut—it is under special circumstances and they will have to choose to caucus with one of the major parties anyway.

It is within the parties where would-be third-party candidates are making the biggest difference. Dennis Kucinich is perhaps the best-known “progressive” in Congress, but he's not elected on the Progressive Party ticket. He's a Democrat. And Ron Paul is the most successful libertarian in Congress; he's doing important work to rein in the Federal Reserve, but he's only ever been elected to hold public office as a Republican. When he ran on the Libertarian Party ticket, he lost.

As the Libertarian and Green parties' lack of representation at the federal level demonstrates, it is very difficult and can take a long time to build up the party infrastructure necessary to take control of Congress. Most important, every hour spent doing so would be one less hour than we can afford to lose in the fight to take America back from the big spenders in Washington, D.C.

W
HEN
D
ICK
A
RMEY LEFT
his position as a university professor and chair of the economics department in 1983, he decided to run for Congress. At the time he had no party affiliation and zero party loyalty and had not paid a moment's notice to the practice of politics in almost twenty years. He considered politics a curious form of juvenile delinquency. Politicians, in his limited experience, were shortsighted and self-serving, like undisciplined children.