by Dick Armey
THE NUMBERS GAME
THE TAXPAYER MARCH ON Washington was the largest gathering of fiscal conservatives in history. Nothing else comes close by comparison. Indeed, this was indisputably one of the largest protests of any kind ever in D.C. Martin Luther King’s monumental March on Washington, by comparison, was 250,000 strong6.
The size of the crowd was so large that it became the source of heated—and partisan—debate in the media. In fact, the debate started before the first activist arrived in D.C. A private memo released by the House Democratic leadership predicted a big crowd the morning of the march. “As you may know,” the memo read, “FreedomWorks held a Capitol Hill demonstration yesterday7 that turned into an impromptu rally for embattled Rep. Joe Wilson. Now, based off of news reports and comments from leaders in the Tea Party movement, it looks like Saturday’s event is going to be a huge gathering, estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to two million people.” This was the Democratic spin machine setting what it thought was a ridiculously high bar, presumably to ridicule the actual attendance the next day.
Bad strategy, Madam Speaker.
I was stunned by the number of people8 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.
—BILL HEERING, TERRYVILLE, CONNECTICUT
The London Daily Mail reported “as many as one million people9 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 people10. 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 District11 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 crowd12. 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 talking13 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 DAY TO REMEMBER
THAT 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 old14 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.
—MIKE GRUBER, MADISON, ALABAMA
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 b
e vigilant and speak with our votes is lazy and naive.
—JENNIFER GALENA, OHIO
Chapter 7
Why We Must Take Over the Republican Party
Both parties seem to be1 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.
—SILVAN JOHNSON, FULTON, NEW YORK
EVER SINCE RICK SANTELLI 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?
PRINCIPLES, NOT POLITICS
THE 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 year2 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 COUNSELING3, 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.
WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD
WHILE 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 opinion4 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 party5, 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 Republican6 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.