Give Us Liberty (2 page)

Our Founding Fathers entrusted us with the preservation of our liberty. Together, we can save the republic they created.

D
ICK
A
RMEY

Dallas, Texas

Chapter 1
The Silent Majority Speaks

I was so excited we were really doing it. We got to the Harborside Center and all we could see was security and people lined up to see the speech; we were the only protesters. I told Ron that I was right—we'd be the only ones there that day. But we stuck to the plan and he dropped me off at the front entrance and left to park the car. Within minutes, a Fort Myers police officer got right in front of me and told me I had to move. I was the only one there! Can you imagine anyone believing that a woman like me was a threat? I knew right then and there we were doing the right thing. Before long we had six or seven people with us. The media found out about us and I ended up talking to a producer from Fox News. I guess the rest is history
¹
.

—M
ARY
R
AKOVICH

I
T'S DIFFICULT TO SAY
exactly when the modern Tea Party movement came into being. In a way, the question itself is incorrect. It's often asked by the same observers who labeled the movement a “Tea Party,” the ones who ignored it for months until they could no longer hide from the truth. They would like to identify an exact beginning. That would make it easier to track the middle and the end, the conclusion to a phenomenon they believe to be a fluke, a flash in the pan, a temporary surge from the lunatic fringe. It's none of those things. We believe that Americans have always stood up for liberty and possess an innate sense of responsibility to guard their freedoms. In other words, we've always been here. And we're not going away.

A
N
U
NLIKELY
H
ERO

B
EFORE HER GROUNDBREAKING
F
LORIDA
protest in February 2009, Mary Rakovich was better known as a caregiver and animal lover. A fifty-three-year-old grandmother, Mary had worked as an automotive electrical engineer in Michigan before she was laid off in 2005. Unable to find work after several interviews and concerned for ailing in-laws, she and her husband, Ron, relocated to Florida to care for her family.

For most of her life, Mary had remained too busy for politics. Idle discussion about current events was a luxury reserved for those who weren't working to support a family and care for aging parents. What she did feel passionate about was her family and the commonsense principles that guided them. In recent years, however, she noticed that her government did not share her values—in fact, it appeared to be heading in the wrong direction. Enamored with elaborate entitlement programs and endless pork barrel projects, legislators in Washington seemed interested in anything but balancing a budget.

By March 2008 she was hearing staggering numbers on the news. The federal government had ballooned under President Bush. Mary had always held concerns about deficits and spending, but for the first time, it started to really concern her. “How would we pay all of this money back?” she wondered.

As she watched from her living room in Cape Coral, the subprime housing boom slowed, staggered, and crashed. Hoping to find her elected leaders prepared to make hard choices, she was instead disappointed with their reactions.

“President Bush listened to his advisors and made mistakes,” Mary said. “The bank bailout was ridiculous. If you can't pay your bills and your business model has failed, you simply close your doors. That was the way it was supposed to work in our system.”

Mary spent increasing time researching government and economic policy. With the presidential election approaching, she was looking for leaders but was disappointed by the major-party candidates. Senator Barack Obama supported the Bush bailouts. She watched in disbelief as Senator John McCain “suspended” his campaign at the end of September to head back to Washington, not to restore fiscal order but to join in and make sure the bailouts passed. She had volunteered for his presidential campaign but felt he took the wrong position on the financial crisis.

Mary was starting to feel frustrated and angry. “The principles that this country were founded upon were being eroded—freedom was being eroded—and I needed to do something about it,” she said.

After the election, Mary continued her research. She reread the Constitution and brushed up on American history. “I realized how much I believe in the founding principles, how much they mean, how precious our freedom really is.”

Fresh off the campaign trail, President Obama began to push for a trillion-dollar stimulus bill. For Mary, this was simply too much. It seemed the new president was taking a risky bet with other people's money, recklessly hoping for a different result than the various Bush administration stimulus packages and bailouts had already delivered. She was upset and concerned for her children and grandchildren. Inspired to act, Mary began searching for more ways to make her voice heard.

She soon discovered and joined FreedomWorks, the grassroots group we lead, and learned that an activist training seminar was scheduled to take place in Tampa in the coming days. The Rakoviches signed up and attended the workshop with about eighty other Florida citizens. The three-hour training session covered grassroots basics, from calling local talk shows to recruiting activists, hosting an event to using online tools like Twitter and Facebook to build a community of activists.

“The training gave me hope, and I left energized. I saw that others were as concerned as I was. I could see that I was not alone.”

The Rakoviches were talking about putting their new training to use when our colleague Brendan Steinhauser of FreedomWorks called to follow up and support their efforts. He urged them to take it to the streets, saying, “You only need the two of you and a few signs to make your voices heard.”

It did not take long for an opportunity to use their newly acquired skills to present itself. Less than two weeks after the FreedomWorks training seminar, campaign manager Nan Swift learned that President Obama was scheduled to appear in Fort Myers to extol the virtues of his stimulus plan. He would be joined by Charlie Crist, Florida's Republican governor, who had enthusiastically supported the proposed additional federal deficit spending.

They targeted the Obama/Crist rally and got to work. Ron called a local political talk show to announce the protest while Mary reached out to other activists to join them. They scouted the event location, noting the arrangement of barricades and likely restrictions from police and Secret Service personnel. They called local police to make sure a protest would be allowed and to find out about any special restrictions. The night before the rally, Mary gathered poster boards and markers to make signs. Even then, she still had misgivings.

“I thought, What am I doing here? I'm not a protester. Are we going to be the only people out there?”

Mary remembered the speaker's advice at the FreedomWorks seminar:
Have fun with it.
She opened the box of markers and wrote
REAL JOBS, NOT PORK
in big black letters across a poster board. It felt great to
do
something! Come hell or high water, she would be there to greet the president. On February 10, 2009, Mary and Ron Rakovich set out for the Harborside Center in Fort Myers with signs, a cooler of water, and the courage of their convictions.

It was a beautiful Florida day, with clear skies and a light breeze off the river. Attendees were lining up at the front entrance and police could be seen directing traffic. Sticking to their plan, Ron would drop Mary off and park the car while she set up signs and sought out fellow protesters. But as soon as Ron pulled away, a Fort Myers police officer instructed her to move.

“From the beginning, they did not want us engaging the attendees,” Mary explained. “I was told to move to the back parking lot, but the stimulus supporters could stay.” Surprised and angry at being told to move three separate times, she was moved to tears. “I have every right to be here,” she exclaimed to the officers. “I'm just one woman with a sign. Why can't I voice my opinion?”

Undaunted, she moved from the entrance and adjusted the volume of her commentary accordingly. One by one, other protesters began to join her and put her signs to good use. Surrounded by Obama supporters, the group stood their ground and did what they came to do.

Nearby reporters were soon intrigued by the protest. It was obvious at first glance that this was not one of the usual mobs that descend on presidential events. No one was screaming obscenities or proclaiming the usual opposition to war, oil, red meat, or all of the above. These were middle-class Americans of all ages talking about fiscal sanity. And they were
making sense
.

Mary was contacted by a producer at Fox News shortly after the event. She was featured on a newscast later that day talking about the protest. It was her first time in front of a microphone, let alone on live national television, and now she was very nervous.

“I was probably shaking,” she recalled. “The crew asked me to take my glasses off for the remote feed. I couldn't see the camera and was being asked questions through a small earpiece. I could barely hear him. The last time I think I spoke in public was at a preschool parent-teacher meeting.”

The effect was remarkable. Mary's honest sincerity and obvious lack of preparation charmed and intrigued viewers. They listened to what she said and realized they agreed. To the millions who were just as outraged as Mary but unsure of how to make a difference, a role model had been found.

As it turned out, Mary was far from alone. Years of broken budgets and wasteful spending had created vast reservoirs of discontent. Conventional wisdom holds that the government's fiscal irresponsibility, deficits, and federal spending are perennial issues in American politics that never move large numbers of people off the couch or voters to the polls. That assumption was about to be put to the test.

E
CHOES
A
CROSS THE
C
OUNTRY

M
ORE THAN THREE THOUSAND
miles away, Keli Carender was frustrated. A Seattle schoolteacher and member of a local comedy improv troupe, Keli had always been interested in politics and current events. But she had never seen herself as an activist, leaving the marching to others while she aired her views among friends in homes and coffee shops. The closest she had ever come to political demonstration was a weekend back in high school when she participated in a Washington Girls State convention hosted by the American Legion. By spring 2009 Keli was reconsidering her responsibility as a citizen.

“Our nation's fiscal path is just not sustainable,” she said. “You can't continue to spend money you don't have indefinitely.”

She watched what passed for debate over the stimulus package on C-SPAN and reached for the phone, determined to express her objections to her representative. But she rarely got through, and when she did, the congressional staffers were condescending and sarcastic. They acted as though she couldn't possibly understand the workings of the national economy and rather should leave such matters to the professionals.

Keli decided it was time to make a choice. “I could give up and be depressed watching my county commit fiscal suicide, or I could find a way to speak up.” She chose the latter. “I figured that if the Left could use protests to get their message out, so could I.”

Demonstrating the blunt practicality that would typify early activist events, Keli called the local police department in February 2009 and simply asked, “How do you do a protest?” The parks department graciously walked her through the request and permitting process. In just five days she set up a “Porkulus Protest” in downtown Seattle. The next several days were spent reaching out to anyone and everyone who might be willing to publicize or participate. “I called think tanks, clubs, and radio hosts, anyone I could think of that may be interested in coming out,” Keli recalled. She caught a break when popular conservative commentator Michelle Malkin promoted the event on her blog.

On the morning of the event, Keli was nervous that only her parents would show up. But thanks to her work, 120 citizen activists, many of them protesting for the first time, took to the streets to draw attention to fiscal irresponsibility in Washington. “We brought barbecue pork sandwiches,” she recalled with a laugh. “And they did not go to waste.”

At FreedomWorks' headquarters in Washington, D.C., e-mails and phone calls began pouring in. From Tampa to Seattle, people were publicly demanding accountability from their elected leaders. To those who were paying attention, a clear theme had emerged: Mary, Keli, and their fellow citizens across the country live on budgets. They don't spend more than they earn. When times are tough, they make do with less. They expect their government to do the same.

E
NOUGH
I
S
E
NOUGH

A
T THE TURN OF
the millennium the U.S. national debt stood at $5.6 trillion
²
. By the end of 2008 that amount had nearly doubled to $10 trillion
³
, which translates to more than $85,000 per household. By 2018 the deficit is projected to nearly double again to more than $18 trillion
⁴
.

In 2000 the cumulative deficit was just below 60 percent of Gross Domestic Product
⁵
(GDP). According to the Congressional Budget Office, that percentage is expected to rise to more than 100 percent by 2012
⁶
. By comparison, France's 2010 debt-to-GDP ratio
⁷
is 84 percent.

Since 2003 the total national debt has increased by more than $500 billion each year with shocking increases of $1 trillion in 2008 and $1.9 trillion in 2009
⁸
. Not surprisingly, this spending is far outpacing the growth of the economy. In 2000 the federal budget was $1.6 trillion. By 2009 the budget had expanded to $3.6 trillion but only took in $2.1 trillion in revenue
⁹
. This means that the federal government is now borrowing nearly fifty cents of every dollar it spends.