Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America (14 page)

The difference between those two kinds of “progress” is what made the second iteration of the Tea Party so unique in American political history. There was no grand plan. There was no charismatic leader. There was no particular candidate to rally around. It was a core value of the Tea Party ethos: nobody gets to tell anyone else what to do, and everyone is responsible for their own work and their own actions. We act by mutual consent based on the trader principle—value for value. It’s a contract of sorts, an unspoken agreement that everyone understands. That’s what makes it binding.

The conventional wisdom was that this massive uprising, now acknowledged as very real by mainstream media, would evaporate with the passage of the Democrats’ government takeover of health care on March 21, 2010. After all, stopping Obamacare had become the singular focus of the grassroots movement, the raison d’être of the Tea Party, by the spring of 2010. Those in charge secretly hoped they would go away. That was part of the plan. The likely reason Obamacare actually passed was a predominant assumption among Democrats, which was aggressively promoted by their leaders, that people would go back home, passions would fade, and this formidable protest movement would lose cohesiveness once the bill left the headlines of the
Washington Post
. This arrogance was consistent with the by-any-means-necessary approach used to pass the $768 billion stimulus legislation in the early days of the Obama administration. Public opposition did not seem to matter, because the insiders were told that voters would shift their attentions, with the next day’s above-the-fold headline.

The extraordinary tactical legislative maneuvers and procedural trickery employed by the Obama administration, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi demonstrated this arrogance; that people would forget, or even learn to like the massive expansion of government’s role in health care. That’s how things had always worked in the past, after all. Crisis, and then an expansion of the leviathan state, and the ratchet effect of government control and expenditures since the halcyon days of John Maynard Keynes.
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Structurally, the Tea Party didn’t stay a protest movement very long following the September 12 march. Certainly there were countless additional rallies all the way until Election Day 2010. But the gatherings themselves took on a different purpose. Street protests serve a particular tactical purpose: to get the attention of the political establishment, and to build sympathy for your cause with the public. By 2010, local gatherings were taking on a different tone. Each group was now building organization at the local level. This somewhat amorphous building process is impossible to quantify, but you could literally see it happening. There were more and more local groups on the ground, and they were growing. Every group that I would visit was either built by someone or contained a substantial block of folks who had attended the March on Washington. Countless times I heard the same story that one young mom told me on August 18, 2010, as we stood on the front stairs of Sciortino’s Restaurant in Brewster, New York, at a rally put together by the Hudson Valley Patriots. “I’ve never done this before,” she told me, “but being there that day on September 12 proved to me that there were enough people out there just like me. I could do this. We just have to get organized.”

Four academic researchers from Harvard University have attempted to quantify the effect that Tea Party protests had on the November elections, and other policy-making outcomes, in a paper entitled: “Do Political Protests Matter? Evidence from the Tea Party Movement.” They find a positive relationship:

How does political change come about? While freedom of speech and assembly are central pillars of democracy, recognized as intrinsically valuable, it is unclear how effective exercising these freedoms is in bringing about change. Although there are numerous historical episodes where political change has been associated with, or been preceded by, political protests and demonstrations, such as the French Revolution, the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and the recent Arab Spring manifestations, it is unclear to what extent these protests caused the change. Since protests are likely to occur during episodes when political beliefs in society change, it is difficult to disentangle whether protests cause political change, or simply reflect unobservable belief changes. Empirical evidence of the causal effects of protests therefore remain scarce.

We show that larger rallies cause an increase in turnout in favor of the Republicans in the 2010 Congressional elections, and increase the likelihood that incumbent Democratic representatives retire. Incumbent policymaking is affected as well: representatives respond to large protests in their district by voting more conservatively in Congress. Finally, the estimates imply significant multiplier effects: for every protester, Republican votes increase by seven to fourteen votes. Together our results show that protests can build political movements that ultimately affect policy.
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By August 2010, in battlegrounds like the 19th District in Brewster, the window of opportunity provided by the 2010 midterm elections was fast approaching, and the Tea Party was quickly evolving into a powerful Get Out the Vote (GOTV) machine. The transition to Tea Party 2.0 may have seemed like an intentional, conscious rebuke to naysayers in the media who were predicting the demise of the Tea Party after the Democrats jammed Obamacare through. But it was an obvious evolution for a citizen movement that had once again been ignored by official Washington. Obama hadn’t listened. Pelosi wasn’t listening, and wasn’t interested in the opinions of any of us, arrogantly saying, “You’ve heard about the controversies within the bill, the process about the bill, one or the other. . . . But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy.”
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To activists on the ground, it was painfully clear that those in charge—the
management
—were not going to listen. So activists started shifting their attention to the next logical step in institutional reform. It was time to shake up senior management. It was time to make some personnel changes. Someone needed to be fired. The American people needed to take their shareholders ballot to a vote. Like entrepreneurs responding to a shift in customer demand, Tea Partiers set out to learn effective GOTV tactics and went to the task of political accountability.

At the time of this transformation into organization building, it wasn’t just the Democrats who failed to see this seismic political paradigm shift that was changing the rules of the game. The Republican ruling class—leaders within the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee—were all proceeding as if nothing had changed since the last election. It was business as usual. Just another day at the office. “Nothing to see here.” Why didn’t they see it? Think about the analogy of a failing company again. Entrenched management surrounds itself with staff and a board that insulates leadership from change, from new perspectives and outside voices. Even if someone had broken through the inner circle of yes-men and clued them in, were Republican pooh-bahs ever willing to give up some of their power for the opportunity to solve the government’s spending addiction?

AT THE MARGIN

C
ARL
M
ENGER, ONE OF THE
A
USTRIAN
S
CHOOL ECONOMISTS I MENTIONED
in Chapter 2, is best known in the economics profession as one of the first thinkers to solve the theory of value. The value of something is not intrinsic, Menger said. It is always determined “subjectively” by consumers choosing “at the margin,” based on what they already have, and what they still want and need. It has nothing to do, per se, with the amount of labor that went into making something, as Karl Marx claimed. Water, for example, is a necessity of life, but succeeding buckets of water have diminishing marginal utility to the consumer. The first drink of ice-cold water on a hot day is priceless. The tenth gallon, not so much. Demand for a product is about intensity of feeling and how much you value it, at the moment you make a decision. Menger’s insight was an important shift in our understanding of how the real world actually works, because he demonstrated how it was that two people could mutually benefit from an exchange. If value is based on objective inputs like labor, then trade is always, at best, a zero-sum transaction, where someone wins because someone else has lost. But exchange does not happen that way. Trading would not happen unless both parties are better off, value for value. For instance, when you go to Starbucks they want your $3 and you want that Venti brew. Trade happens and both parties are better off. It’s about growing the pie, and creating more opportunity all around.

Electoral decisions, like economic decisions, are made “at the margin.” In politics, this means that the last vote counted is in many ways the most important one, because it may be the vote that puts candidates over the top, particularly in tight elections in swing districts. For Republicans and Democrats alike, they can count on a certain number of votes from their most loyal consumers—the so-called Republican and Democrat bases—who habitually vote the party line regardless of who the candidate is. In Nancy Pelosi’s left-leaning congressional district, that Democratic base is enough to virtually guarantee her safe reelection. But for many political races in many congressional districts, it’s the marginal vote, the so-called swing voter, that determines the outcome of elections and, typically, which party controls the House and the Senate.

How do you attract that last vote? Republican thinking on attracting swing voters is a zero-sum game, static thinking that implicitly assumes a fixed number of potential votes and that the best way for Republicans to win is to appeal to everyone. Republicans, the logic goes, could win only by peeling off enough Democrats and by embracing Democratic thinking on some issues. Like cutting taxes and then dramatically expanding Medicare Part D. Or voting for a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution and then voting for a $700 billion bailout of overleveraged investment banks. It’s a philosophical potpourri: a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Tea Partiers affectionately call these mixed-bag candidates RINOs—Republicans in Name Only—a term usually linked to Republican candidates who have sold out their free-market principles for the sake of reelection. But it is more likely that the recruiting and running of RINOs is the conscious operating strategy of the GOP establishment. The best candidates, according to the experts, are usually half like Them, and half like Us.

But is that how the real world works? What if the real swing voter is, in fact, motivated by a very different value calculation? What if product differentiation could create new market demand? What if the swing vote, the difference between winning and losing, is defined by a bloc of potential consumers, who might show up and vote if there is a good enough reason to stand in line at voting booths?

It’s about intensity of demand. A product is worth whatever the consumer thinks it’s worth, at the margin.

So, what was the Republican brand worth in early 2009, at the margin? Not that much. There were very few buyers and the words
I have abandoned free market principles to save the free market system
still hung like the Sword of Damocles over Republicans who had traded principle for the temporary security of “doing something” even though that something violated everything that they had publicly espoused. What were they thinking?

A PERFECT RECORD

R
EPUBLICANS SEEM PARTICULARLY PRONE TO DOING THE SAME THING
over and over again, expecting different results. Consider the case of freshman U.S. senator Pat Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania. The GOP famously circled the wagons around incumbent RINO Arlen Specter in 2004, with President George W. Bush, Senator Rick Santorum, and an army of party apparatchiks running to the defense of one of the most unreliable Republicans in the Senate, narrowly beating back a primary challenge by Toomey. Specter returned the favor by providing a deciding vote for the Obama stimulus in early 2009. On April 15, 2009, as Tax Day Tea Parties swept across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Toomey announced a second challenge, this time focusing on Specter’s vote for the highly unpopular Obama stimulus-spending bill.

Specter the defector promptly switched parties. It wasn’t personal. It was political: “I’ve looked at the polls,” Specter said. “I can’t win as a Republican. I can’t win as an independent. The only way I have a shot is to be a Democrat.”
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Specter’s switch ultimately gave Democrats the sixtieth vote, the vote needed to enact Obamacare.
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Despite all this, there was no sign of buyer’s remorse at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), no acknowledgment of culpability among the GOP cognoscenti for their hand in helping President Obama enact one of the most sweeping expansions of federal government control in a generation.

Even after Specter switched parties, Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, the NRSC chairman, initially refused to endorse Toomey for the Senate seat, even though he was now unopposed in the GOP primary. Republican senator-for-life and NRSC co-chair Orrin Hatch predicted, with seemingly scientific certainty, that Toomey could not win statewide in Pennsylvania, saying, “I don’t think there is anybody in the world who believes he can get elected senator there.”
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Both Cornyn and Hatch had voted for TARP. Cornyn initially opposed a strategy to run against Obamacare in 2010. “Rather than promising to scrap the bill in its entirety,” the
Huffington Post
reported in May 2010, “the GOP will pledge to just get rid of the more controversial parts.” “There is non-controversial stuff here like the preexisting conditions exclusion and those sorts of things,” Cornyn argued. “Now we are not interested in repealing that. And that is frankly a distraction.”
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