Hostile Takeover: Resisting Centralized Government's Stranglehold on America

by Matt Kibbe

  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.7

  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.”8

  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

  CARL MENGER, ONE OF THE AUSTRIAN SCHOOL 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

  REPUBLICANS 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.”9

  Specter’s switch ultimately gave Democrats the sixtieth vote, the vote needed to enact Obamacare.10 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.”11

  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.”12

  The one thing that John Cornyn was uncertain about, it seemed, was the ability of Senate GOP candidates to win elections in 2010:

  That’s going to be real hard, to be honest with you. Everybody who runs could be the potential tipping point to get Democrats to 60. We’ve not only got to play defense; we’ve got to claw our way back in 2010. It’ll be a huge challenge. So far this cycle, Republicans have been faced with retirements in four swing states, emerging primaries against at least three of their members and a map that, after two cycles of big GOP losses, continues to favor Democrats.13

  Regardless of what the Republican illuminati were thinking, the rest of us were quite certain that we had to clean House. And the Senate, if we could. A growing number of Americans now understood that their country was in trouble. They had also come to the conclusion that there was no way to fix the current management team in Washington, D.C. We would need personnel changes before we could solve policy problems.

  Tea Partiers knew that we had to beat the Republicans before we could beat the Democrats. This was the initial offer in a shareholder battle that might well determine ownership of the company. That probably explains why many of the candidates who authentically stood for something—candidates who actually believed that the government was spending too much money it does not have; candidates who actually knew that government-run health care would be disastrous to both the health of patients and the financial health of the nation—were paid little mind by top GOP strategists.

  The movement focused on shifting power from the White House back to Congress, as the Constitution (which embodies the separation—and decentralization—of power) mandated. The Tea Party’s approach to campaigning reflected the movement’s broader philosophy of decentralization. While the Tea Party largely operated in Republican circles, having determined that there was little room for the ideas of fiscal responsibility and individual freedom in a Democratic Party now wholly owned by radical progressives, the movement and many of its candidates clearly did not have support from the Republican Party. The Tea Party looked in districts that hadn’t been in play before, rejecting the old standard that money equals television and television equals victory, and replacing it with the idea that grassroots organization is infinitely more powerful.

  So activists focused on truly grassroots campaigning. Eschewing traditional television ad buys—after all, there was no established organization to raise money to pay for production and airtime—the Tea Party took to social networks, technological and personal, to spread the message. As important as this strategy was, it is hard to win an election without a good, capable candidate. As it turns out, the grassroots protests were not only a good recruitment mechanism for building boots on the ground, they also created a powerful market signal to potential candidates with both the principles and the practical skills needed to win public office. This was a fundamentally different dynamic than had occurred in 1994, the last time Republicans had taken control of the U.S. House of Representatives. Then, there was no organic candidate recruitment device like Tea Party protests. As a result, many of the winners were accidental, caught in a wave of new voters opposed to President Bill Clinton’s economic stimulus spending and attempted takeover of health care. Many in that freshman class were swept back out in 1996, lacking the skills to build an effective reelection campaign.

  But 2010 was different from 1994, and it was going to be fundamentally different from 2008. However, the old guard didn’t see it. On January 4, 2010, Sean Hannity asked Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele whether the GOP could retake the House. “Not this year,” Steele replied.14 In September, Cornyn told his Republican colleagues, “While we have the momentum on our side right now, it is also important to recognize that 2010 remains an uphill climb for us.”15 As late as October 2010, Pete Sessions, chairman of the NRCC, was cautious in predicting winning the thirty-nine House seats required for a majority.

  UNDER THE RADAR

  RATHER THAN GO ALONG WITH THE GOP’S PREEMPTIVE SURRENDER, the Tea Party set out to win elections anyway, and became the first movement to prove that the top-down method of campaigning, focused on Old Media ad buys organized by centralized clearinghouses of information and money, isn’t the best path to achieve electoral success. The GOP establishment was still playing a zero-sum game, trimming their sails, preparing, preemptively, for more failure. The Tea Party was growing the pie, adding new potential voters to its ranks, voters who would potentially show up for something different than the same old, same old. Republican campaign consultant Jon Lerner reported that consistently half of Republican voters he questioned in primary polling said they aligned more with the Tea Party than with the Republican Party.16

  In late October, the Washington Post published the results of a survey of hundreds of Tea Party groups, reporting, “a remarkable 86 percent of local leaders said most of their members are new to political activity.” But the Post was skeptical of any tangible political implications. Instead, this analysis found “a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.”17 Maybe this was wishful thinking? Or maybe it was an understandable inability to recognize a paradigm shift, from the bottom up, as it was actually emerging, person by person, value for value.

  Many of the brightest stars in the 2010 freshman class found themselves recruited, and then organically propelled to prominence in the very emergence of this “disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings.” These candidates overcame long odds—and often aggressive opposition from their own party—to make waves in Washington as prominent members of the “Tea Party Class.”

  One of those Americans was Mick Mulvaney. In September 2009, the South Carolina state senator attended a town hall meeting
on health care hosted by his fourteen-term U.S. representative, Democrat John Spratt. Spratt was not only an entrenched incumbent; he was the powerful chairman of the House Budget Committee, a key architect in Washington’s unprecedented spending spree. The GOP establishment considered him unbeatable.

  In a meeting typical of so many others occurring around the country at the time, voters booed and jeered Spratt as he attempted to defend Obamacare and a government that was spending so much money that we do not have. “I decided to run while sitting in the back of that meeting,” Mulvaney said.18

  Another of those Americans who had decided to make personnel changes in Washington, D.C., was Joe Thompson. Unknown to Mulvaney, South Carolina activist Thompson was thinking along the very same lines. After holding the first Tea Party rally in the 5th District, Joe Thompson and a number of other local leaders got together to plan a campaign against Spratt. “We didn’t even have a candidate yet,” Thompson recalls. “Most of us are businessmen, so we looked at it from a business standpoint—what goals did we need to meet to get Spratt out of office? We knew we had to keep things simple, like a marketing campaign.” Not knowing that GOP experts were counseling otherwise, Thompson “chose two issues—health care and fiscal responsibility—and highlighted how Spratt was failing to represent us on both.” Thompson and his wife kept an e-mail list of several hundred activists from across the large district and corresponded with local leaders often, “to make sure we were all keeping on the same simple message. By the time the NRCC got involved with the race, we had already done much of their work for them.”