Takeover (27 page)

The video immediately “went viral” and was seen by millions of people who shared Santelli’s view that those who had paid their mortgages on time, and scrimped, and saved, and did without to meet their obligations should not be forced to bail out those who had overextended themselves, or in many cases engaged in outright fraud, to purchase an extravagant lifestyle.

Rick Santelli was right, and unlike the establishment Republicans, who spent the first months after their 2008 defeat mealy-mouthing about how they wanted President Obama to succeed, principled conservatives outside of the Capitol Hill Republican establishment understood that millions of grassroots conservatives did not want Obama’s socialist agenda to succeed. The attitude of these millions of grassroots conservatives was perhaps best summed up by Rush Limbaugh in remarks he made at CPAC in February 2009.

Limbaugh spoke for millions when he asked the audience at CPAC, “What is so strange about being honest about saying I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation? Why would I want that to succeed?”

Less than a month after Barack Obama took the oath of office and began the “transformation” of America, the “TEA Party,” or Taxed Enough Already, movement was born.

The viral response to Rick Santelli’s “we need a Chicago Tea Party” monologue was not lost on grassroots, limited government and constitutional conservative activists around the country.

Within twenty-four hours of Santelli’s broadcast there was a conference call of about fifty or so grassroots, limited-government constitutional conservative activist leaders to discuss how to organize the opposition to Obama’s liberal agenda. Through the efforts of Michael Patrick Leahy, Jenny Beth Martin, Mark Meckler, Amy Kremer, Eric Odom, Stacy Mott, Christina Botteri, Lorie Medina, and dozens of others, the first “Nationwide Chicago Tea Party” was organized and the Tea Party movement was born.

At that time I saw things a little differently from some of my
friends. Yes, it was important to motivate these newly energized conservative voters to oppose President Obama’s destructive policies, but even more important, all the people who were going online to watch Rick Santelli’s comments and forwarding them to their friends were the new troops we needed to win our fight for the soul of the Republican Party.

It’s the primaries, stupid!

It wouldn’t do the cause of conservative governance much good if all of these newly energized voters showed up and elected establishment Republicans in the mold of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Denny Hastert, Bill Frist, George W. Bush, and John McCain.

The Republican establishment still hadn’t figured out that the Tea Party activists were the new GOP, and they were no longer interested in the go along, get along politics of the Big Government Republican establishment.

While I won’t go into all the legends and myths surrounding the growth of the Tea Party movement, I will cite one example of how the Republican establishment did its best to smother this new conservative movement at birth.

President Obama nominated progressive Republican John McHugh of New York to be secretary of the Army and a special election to fill the seat was called.

The Democrats nominated liberal activist Bill Owens, and the Republican establishment pulled out all the stops to hand the nomination to Republican New York assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava—who was even more liberal than the incumbent Republican John McHugh.

Sarah Palin, many leading conservatives, Tea Party activists, and other conservative movement organizations, such as the Club for Growth and Freedom Works, threw their support behind Doug Hoffman, a conservative activist who had challenged Scozzafava for the GOP nomination and won the nomination of the New York Conservative Party in New York’s unique multiparty system.

The Republican establishment did everything they could to force
Dede Scozzafava down the throats of the conservative voters of New York’s Twenty-Third District, but she just wasn’t selling—even after a host of the Republican Party’s more conservative insiders, such as Newt Gingrich and Republican Study Committee chairman Jeb Hensarling of Texas, endorsed her.

With Scozzafava fading and conservative Doug Hoffman surging and having the potential to win the three-way race, the Republican establishment was in a panic. Then, with just a few days left in the campaign, Scozzafava withdrew from the race and endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens.

The GOP leadership’s backing of Ms. Scozzafava was a slap in the face to Tea Party activists, town hall protesters, and conservatives across the country who wanted change. The American people were beginning to realize that the GOP leadership and establishment were (and are) as much a part of the problem as are the Democrats.

Doug Hoffman and NY-23 were an earthquake in American politics in 2009, and were the first of many challenges to establishment Republicans that would be seen in the 2010 elections and beyond. Ramming the Scozzafava nomination down the throats of conservatives was one more example of the “closed tent” mentality of Big Government, establishment Republicans who have worked long and hard to keep conservatives out of power at the national, state, and local levels. The outrageous decision by Republican leaders to pour nine hundred thousand dollars into the NY-23 race against a conservative unleashed a fury against the National Republican Congressional Committee that caused many conservatives to withhold their donations. I hoped that fury would lead to new GOP leadership.

Hoffman lost, but the race was still quite close, and it proved once again that rather than give an opening for the principled conservative to take the seat, many establishment Republicans would back a Democrat.

The Republican establishment was humiliated by Dede Scozzafava and her withdrawal and endorsement of the Democrat, and consequently, going into the 2010 Republican primaries they were
much more reluctant to play favorites and try to muscle the grass roots into backing a Big Government “Democrat-lite” candidate, which ultimately worked in the favor of the GOP during the 2010 campaign.

As I saw it, the actions of the GOP establishment demonstrated who the immediate opponent was to the grassroots activists of the new New Right—the Tea Party movement activists, Obamacare town hall meeting protesters, and grassroots conservatives across the country—and it was the Big Government Republican establishment, not President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Harry Reid, and the Democrats.

We may have lost the Doug Hoffman congressional campaign, but conservatives, and especially the newly energized activists of the Tea Party movement, were beginning to understand: “It’s the primaries, stupid!”

But before limited-government constitutional conservatives of the Tea Party movement could get down to the business of nominating and electing candidates, they had to relearn the lessons that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan taught us in the 1960s and 1970s about the folly of forming a third political party.

Due to New York’s unique system of allowing candidates to run on more than one “line” on the ballot, and combine the votes, Hoffman could present himself as a candidate for both the Republican and the Conservative parties. This was a feat that could not be replicated in any other state.

Many grassroots conservatives began the year 2010 with the idea that the only way to defeat the Republican establishment was to bolt the party and form a new party.

My counsel to Tea Party movement leaders, then and now, is that they should work to be a third force operating in the Republican Party, but should not try to organize themselves into a third party.

A third party would be a disaster for the cause of limited government. It would split the center-right vote and put liberals in charge with unstoppable majorities that would soon act to make sure conservatives were frozen out of the legislative process permanently
and completely.

Instead, Tea Party members and other grassroots conservatives should focus exclusively on the Republican and Democratic primaries, I told those assembled for a January 29–31, 2010, meeting of 125 Tea Party leaders for a grassroots training event at the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport Westin hotel.

Essentially, I told them not to think about 2012 at all, not even about November 2010. The focus, I emphasized, should be to challenge every establishment Republican and Democrat in all federal, state, and local primary races.

What I told the Tea Party movement leaders back in January 2010 still holds. Our country didn’t get into the mess we’re in because of the policies and skills of Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid.

The people who are responsible for handing power to the liberals in 2006, 2008, and in 2012, are the Republican establishment: George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay, Dennis Hastert, Bill Frist, John McCain, Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, and other establishment GOP leaders.

The disastrous policies of the Big Government Republicans and their content-free campaigns caused the voters to want to fire Republicans in 2006 and 2008—and certainly gave voters little or no reason to hire them in 2012.

Too many conservative leaders have been complicit in this because most conservative leaders just kept quiet while Bush, Rove, DeLay, Hastert, Frist, McConnell, and Boehner ran full speed ahead with all their spending, deficits, and principle-free legislative agenda.

But Tea Party activists are different. The power of the Tea Party movement is that it is unfettered to the old ways of doing things and the old leaders of the Republican establishment. Limited-government constitutional conservatives believe in principles, not just political power. What a tremendous improvement.

On the one-year anniversary of Rick Santelli’s “We need a Chicago Tea Party” broadcast, I saw a grassroots movement that had
already contributed much to the cause of conservative governance.

In the year or less that the Tea Party movement had been in existence, their grassroots activism was already paying dividends. If there had been no Tea Party opposition to President Obama’s legislative program, Obamacare, cap and trade, union card check, and much more federal spending would probably have been enacted into law in 2009.

That year, the Tea Party had become the fastest-growing political movement perhaps in American history. It was getting bigger by the day, and efforts by the political and media establishment to denigrate it merely fueled it. I expected more establishment Republican defeats in primaries that year than ever before.

With only a little hyperbole, I suggested in an op-ed for
Investor’s Business Daily
that “most Big Government incumbents would be well advised to follow Senators Bayh, Dodd and Dorgan and voluntarily retire, or the revitalized conservative movement led by Tea Partiers will enforce retirement this November.”

At the time much was being written about the phenomenon called the Tea Party movement, some accurate, and some fantastical.

Few commentators in the establishment media grasped that at its core, the Tea Party movement is a revolution of fed-up middle-class Americans of the “Country Class” Angelo Codevilla has written about, and a response to political arrogance—and that it was as much a rebellion against the Republican establishment leadership as it was a revolt against the specific policies of President Barack Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress.

The Tea Party movement developed independently from the conservative movement, but at the local and state level is a natural ally to the cause of small, limited, constitutional government. However, at the national level most conservatives are fettered to the Big Government establishment Republican leadership. The Tea Party started precisely where the conservative movement once had, as outsiders to the political establishment.

As I often do, I began my speech to the Tea Party leadership in Dallas by looking at my watch and saying, “Hi. Where have you
been? [pause] I’ve been waiting for you. [pause] I’ve been waiting for fifty years for you people.”

I had been working and waiting fifty years for this populist, principled, and constitutional groundswell against Big Government and the quasi-socialistic, crony capitalist establishment institutions that have abused power and trust at the expense of hard-working Americans, their children, and their grandchildren.

Due to the enthusiasm, tireless work and commitment to principle of the Tea Party movement and the candidates they fielded and supported, the 2010 election turned out to be almost everything I had hoped.

One of the first big wins for the Tea Party movement was in South Carolina, where Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Trey Gowdy won great victories against establishment Republican candidates in the state’s primary election.

South Carolina congressmen Gresham Barrett and Bob Inglis both supported the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. In the governor’s race (Barrett) and the two congressional races, the candidates associated with the Washington Republican establishment, like Bob Inglis, lost, and the small-government constitutional conservative Tea Party candidates, Nikki Haley, Trey Gowdy, and Tim Scott, won landslide victories.

This was alarming news for GOP establishment politicians such as John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and all closely associated with them. The Tea Party steamroller was rolling Big Government Republicans right out of town, and it was too late for the Republican establishment to stop it.

If they couldn’t stop it, they could try to co-opt it, which they did with their so-called Pledge to America, billed as a follow-up to the Contract with America that had helped lead Republicans to the House majority in 1994.

The Pledge to America was, as Erick Erickson of
RedState
put it so well, “mom-tested, kid-approved pablum” designed only to help Republicans in the 2010 congressional elections. And to that end
it might have had some small benefit, but it wasn’t a real legislative agenda, and unlike the Contract with America which actually got a vote, at least in the House, the Pledge quickly faded from view after the election.