Give Us Liberty

by Dick Armey

  The Conservative Party of New York, which often backs Republicans, refused to endorse Scozzafava. Instead, it nominated Doug Hoffman, a fiscal conservative who had never run for political office. But the national Republicans, including Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, threw their support behind Scozzafava. The Republican Party establishment once again stood against grassroots citizens. A line was drawn in the sand.

  As is typically the case at FreedomWorks, we first learned about this battle from the activists on the ground in New York. The political establishment had it wrong, they said. Scozzafava could not win; she was wrong on the core economic issues—the very issues that voters in the 23rd District cared about most. She would quite simply fail to compel voters looking for a real change from the deficit-spending agenda of the Pelosi Democrats in Washington.

  Former Democratic House Speaker Tip O’Neill famously said that “all politics is local.” He was giving advice to Democrats, of course. Democrats run on what they can bring home to the district, building a voting coalition of constituencies that want something from the federal government. Republican voters, on the other hand, tend to look for something else, a more national vision. They want fiscal responsibility, a good climate for economic growth and jobs, and to be left alone.

  And so it went with this race. Voters were looking for a candidate who was willing to say no to new spending, someone who would take a principled stand for spending restraints and against more government meddling in our health care. We believed Doug Hoffman was that candidate; moreover, we believed he would be the winning candidate.

  Dick got involved in the race early and endorsed Doug’s thirdparty challenge. “My own view right now is the myth that you have to be a moderate—a Democrat lite—to win in the Northeast probably has less standing now than in any time since I’ve been in politics,” he told the New York Times. “The small-government candidate in the Republican Party15—or running as an independent—is going to be the one to draw the energy of these voters.” Steve Forbes, FreedomWorks’ vice chairman, and Sarah Palin endorsed Hoffman as well, making this the race that the national media was following, a measure of the new Tea Party.

  As would become a pattern in elections to come, the Tea Party movement “nationalized” this election. Activists from all over the state of New York were getting involved in Doug Hoffman’s underdog bid for Congress. “Word of his insurgent campaign spread locally and nationally, via online activist groups and publicity from conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “The campaign attracted volunteers like Jennifer Bernstone, a performing artist in Canastota, New York, who had never been involved in politics. Bernstone had been seething ever since President George W. Bush agreed to bail out teetering Wall Street banks in late 2008. She snapped into political action a few weeks ago, after the GOP nominated Scozzafava. ‘Dede is more liberal than the Democrat,’16 Bernstone said, as she put in a day of campaign work that began at 8:00 A.M. and was likely to end after midnight.” FreedomWorks staff and volunteers joined the efforts, going door to door with voter educating materials and distributing literature outside polling places up until the last moments of the campaign.

  It was an amazing run to the finish line. In just two months, Hoffman went from totally unknown and unfunded to the leader in virtually every poll of likely voters. Siena College polling showed the dramatic rise in support for the Conservative insurgent candidate, who went from 16 percent in late September to a leading position of 41 percent support two days before the election. Scozzafava, conversely, went from 35 percent support in late September to 20 percent in late October. She was in third place17, trailing both the Conservative and the Democrat.

  The erstwhile Republican dropped out of the race with just three days remaining, echoing the Left’s message by blaming the “hate and lies and the deceitfulness18” of her opponents for the dramatic collapse of her campaign. In truth, Scozzafava had fallen so far behind in the polls that she could not reasonably expect to win. The voters had rejected her candidacy based on their concerns about a federal government that was out of control. She had not been able to make a credible case that she would go to Washington and help turn things back around.

  This cleared the way for an easy Hoffman victory. The latest Siena College poll had Doug up by a five-point lead against the Democrat, Bill Owens, on November 1, just two days before the election. It was an incredible, meteoric rise from obscurity for the politically unpolished, but principled, fiscal conservative.

  The nascent national grassroots movement built upon the founding principles of liberty had been ignored, then dismissed, and then ridiculed as a tempest in a teapot. Working together on a clear mission, we were all about to demonstrate the real world impact of good ideas combined with “boots on the ground.” Together, we would finally demonstrate to the political class the true power of our decentralized, leaderless community.

  We had waited and worked a long time for this, since the 2008 battle over TARP, when the colluded “crony capitalism” of Wall Street and official Washington was defeated by the people. That victory was far too temporary, snatched back by a desperate establishment within days of their first defeat on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. We would take back some of that ground on November 3 in upstate New York.

  And then Dede Scozzafava, the favored candidate of the Republicans, endorsed the Democrat, Bill Owens. “Since beginning my campaign, I have told you that this election is not about me; it’s about the people of this district,” she claimed. “It is in this spirit that I am writing to let you know19 I am supporting Bill Owens for Congress and urge you to do the same.”

  Owens ended up winning by capturing 48.3 percent of the vote, with the Conservative Hoffman receiving 46 percent. Everyone agreed that Scozzafava’s decision to team with the Democratic Party had been the margin of difference in Hoffman’s defeat.

  The political bait and switch of a “Republican” to a Democrat was a bitter disappointment, but it was a stunt that we would see again from the establishment’s candidates. The betrayal always arrived at the moment of personal defeat and disappointment, publicly rationalized as being in the best interests of “the people.”

  Did the Scozzafava debacle disprove the strategy of taking over the Republican Party? Absolutely not. It was the first in a multistep recovery for the GOP. The battle over the 23rd Congressional District in New York was the place where the Tea Party movement put the Republican establishment on notice: Ignore us at your peril. It was a necessary step on the path to recovery and political credibility. Now they knew we meant business. The Tea Party delivered and we were on our way to acceptance.

  PARTY ANIMALS

  POLITICAL PARTIES, REMEMBER, ARE always intellectually and morally inferior to good ideas. Candidates of one party can sometimes just as easily run with the other party. They are hollow vessels that can remain conveniently empty of any semblance of a coherent worldview or guiding principles. Just ask Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, who fled the Republican Party at that very moment when it became clear that a true fiscal conservative, Pat Toomey, was about to take his job from him in the Republican primary. For a short time, Specter the defector was a Democrat. Now he is fully retired from politics by the voters of Pennsylvania, perhaps seeking the “End-of-Job Counseling” promised on the protest sign held up at the September 12 Taxpayer March on Washington. Who knows, the appropriation of funds for this program may be buried in the $786 billion government stimulus Specter voted for in 2009.

  Beyond the 23rd Congressional District in upstate New York, there were other signs that the Republican establishment still did not understand the grassroots uprising that was going on across America.

  The New York Times best summed up the strategic divide between the establishment and the grassroots ground troops that made up the Tea Party: “Ms. Scozzafava fit the model of candidate20 advocated by Republican leaders like Mr. Steele and Senator John Cornyn of Texas [the cha
irman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee]: one whose views might not be in keeping with much of the national party but are more reflective of the district.”

  “A primary is unfolding in Florida, where Gov. Charlie Crist, who is running for the Senate, is facing a challenge from a conservative, Marco Rubio, the former Florida House speaker. Mr. Crist has come under fire from conservatives for, among other things, supporting Mr. Obama on his economic stimulus package. . . . Mr. Cornyn said that he did not see other situations where Republicans could face a similarly divisive primary. He said he expected Mr. Crist to win the nomination.”

  The party illuminati—the perennial class of political operatives that represent the collective wisdom of Republican political strategy—continued to draw all of the wrong lessons from the 2006 and 2008 drubbings that had left Republicans with almost nothing. To win again, they counseled, the party needed to run candidates who acted like Democrats: Republicans should become Democrat-lite.

  Wasn’t this the complacent attitude we were fighting against in 1994? Wasn’t this the exact strategy that had given Democrats a permanent, forty-year majority in the House of Representatives before the Contract with America?

  Why do Republicans insist on acting like Democrats in hopes of regaining political power, while Democrats act like fiscal conservatives in order to win?

  Somewhere along the way to “permanent majority” status, the Republicans who held Congress forgot or abandoned their national vision, letting parochial interests dominate their legislative decision-making process. The “Spirit of ’94” was replaced by a far narrower, politically defined choice criteria. Their question, once articulated by a national vision for America, became: How do we hold our congressional seats and political power? The aberrant behavior, politically defined spending priorities, and scandals involving undue special interest influences that ended up defining the Republicans in 2006 were all a direct consequence of this shift in focus from policy to political power.

  Nowhere was this turn more evident than in the dramatic collapse in fiscal discipline and the corruption of the budgeting process. A national vision of fiscal responsibility—“We will spend your money carefully and we will keep your taxes low”—was replaced with what Jack Abramoff infamously referred to as his “favor factory.” Going into the 2006 elections, one Republican leader actually defended a highly dubious spending provision earmarked for the congressional district of an embattled incumbent, saying it was a reasonable price to pay for holding a Republican seat. What was most remarkable was not even the admission itself, but that he was so comfortable publicly acknowledging his motives.

  Nancy Pelosi skillfully turned this Republican hubris on spending into a Democratic majority, promising to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., and bring a new era of fiscal responsibility, transparency, and accountability to the appropriations process. She never did that, of course, but like candidate Barack Obama two years later, she and her fellow Democrats turned Republican failures into a politically potent strategy. Two election cycles later, the Democrats, dominated by their “progressive” wing, had supermajorities in both the House and the Senate and control of the White House.

  In 2009 we still had our work cut out for us. But the winds of change were in the air. Opponents who seemed invincible just months ago were suddenly vulnerable. Activists in Massachusetts and Florida had watched events unfold in New York and realized that something special was happening. It wasn’t just a protest anymore.

  Chapter 8

  The New Center of American Politics

  ALMOST 150 YEARS AFTER the original band of tea partiers invaded Boston harbor, Massachusetts again played host to an historic act of political independence. In 1773 George Hewes and his fellow patriots stood up for the right to determine their own fate as free men. In 2009 American citizens stood on their forefathers’ shoulders and used that right to send a clear message to the political establishment: it’s still up to us. The power is in the people’s hands. Ignore it at your peril.

  Working closely with independent chapter leaders and Tea Party organizers across the country, FreedomWorks often holds the advantage of knowing the facts on the ground long before the soothsayers in Washington proclaim them to be true. The Scott Brown phenomenon was no exception.

  In December 2009 we were approached by several activists who told us the race in Massachusetts for the Senate seat left vacant when Ted Kennedy died was competitive. Conventional wisdom was wrong, they said. A practicing attorney and former Massachusetts National Guard JAG, Scott Brown held many of the principles we believe in and was swaying voters in a state that had grown weary of liberal rhetoric.

  A LONG SHOT

  ADMITTEDLY, WE WERE DOUBTFUL. After all, this was Massachusetts. Obama had just received 62 percent of the vote in 2008 and the state hadn’t elected a Republican senator since 1972. Moreover, the race was an explicit referendum on Obamacare and the Left’s agenda more broadly. It was a referendum on big government—and it’s not called “Taxachusetts” for nothing. If elected, Democratic candidate Martha Coakley promised to support the work of the president Massachusetts had overwhelmingly supported. Scott Brown, on the other hand, vowed to be the decisive forty-first vote in the Senate against policies that expand the size of government and add to the deficit.

  Because of this, Tea Party activists and grassroots conservatives saw the election as an opportunity to slow or even halt the agenda of the Left. Filling the seat previously held by liberal lion Ted Kennedy with a fiscal conservative would have been more than just a moral victory. It would have sent the forty-first Republican vote to Washington and shattered the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Limited-government advocates realized: Scott Brown’s election has national implications; we needed Brown to win. But could Brown actually win? The election was a little over a month away and most political commentators were writing it off as a shoe-in for the Democrats.

  However, it has been our experience over the years that grassroots activists are often more knowledgeable than those whose job it is to understand the political climate. So we placed a phone call to a part-time employee working for us in Massachusetts named Matt Clemente. Clemente was a twenty-year-old student at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester who was well connected with the Tea Party movement that was developing in Massachusetts. He had spoken at Tea Party events in both Worcester and Boston and was in close contact with leaders from across the state. If the Tea Partiers in Massachusetts were getting behind the Brown campaign, Clemente would know.

  Matt told us that he had only seen one Martha Coakley sign in his hometown of Milford compared to dozens of Scott Brown signs. He told us that many local talk-radio hosts had gotten behind Brown and buzz about the race was dominating the airwaves. He said that almost everyone he talked to said that they were voting for Brown, even fellow college students who had passionately supported Obama’s campaign only a year before. Although these were promising signs, Brown was still lagging in the polls, and we knew that without a strong effort on the part of the grassroots community he stood little chance in a state like Massachusetts.

  Clemente told us that he would call back once he had spoken with fellow activists at a Worcester Tea Party meeting about the election. He was amazed by what he learned. The meeting was held in a small VFW hall that was filled beyond capacity. There weren’t even enough chairs for everyone to sit down. More important, everyone was talking about their contributions to the Brown campaign. Some had been holding signs earlier in the day, others were making phone calls, and some were even taking time off from work to go door-to-door. The meeting that Clemente had expected to draw a few dozen people instead boasted a few hundred, and all of them believed that their next senator could very well be Scott Brown.

  Tea Party activists from across the state (and ultimately from across the country) were drawn to Brown because they saw themselves in him. He campaigned like he was one of us. He was hard-working and dedicated. He was
genuine. He didn’t sit back and let consultants run the show. He shared our hopes and understood our concerns about the growth of government. Disproving the notion that Tea Partiers were extremists who existed outside of the mainstream, Brown’s campaign demonstrated that the Tea Party movement represents the center of American politics.

  After talking to Matt Clemente about the excitement within the grassroots community, we decided that it was time to get to work. We were going to do everything we could to help the in-state activists. We started by appointing Clemente to be our Massachusetts state director. He would be our point man, our eyes and ears on the front lines. Then we tasked FreedomWorks’ campaign manager Nan Swift with creating a side-by-side comparison of the two candidates. We wanted a document to distribute to Massachusetts’s voters that would tell them where each candidate stood on essential issues. With the election just about a month away, there was little time to waste.

  As the Massachusetts Tea Party movement grew stronger by the day, we prepared to make our contribution. First-time activists had gained valuable experience in recent months, and as a result, they became more organized and better equipped to aid in the fight. Clemente told us countless stories of small-business owners or nurses or schoolteachers or even union members who he met with on a daily basis. Time and time again he would hear the same story of someone who had never been politically active but who was now working with the campaign. More and more people were fed up with what was going on in Washington, and there was a growing sentiment that it was time for them to do something. As these individuals began to unify, they became a massive grassroots network made up of members all working toward one goal: stopping the far left’s big-government agenda.