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  Republican In Name Only (RINO) had become the label that disenfranchised Republican voters—the ones who had expected from their elected officials more than just party affiliation—used to tag politicians who talked the talk but seldom missed a vote to expand government spending.

  Matthews was asking a good question: If we knew we could take a seat in Congress by running our Tea Party candidate, would we do it? He knew the right button to push, and he was probably hoping we would take the bait.

  The answer was no.

  FIRST, SECOND, AND LAST PLACE

  IN THE REAL WORLD, third parties don’t win very often. And if you aren’t elected to hold public office, you will never get a chance to enact laws that could benefit the fiscal futures of our children and our grandchildren. Part of the reason for this is our restrictive campaign finance laws. It is very difficult to raise the money needed to run a competitive election in the artificially small amounts dictated by the Federal Election Commission. It’s much easier to start a successful campaign with a network of donors and a political party apparatus.

  In practice this means that the few third-party candidates who do rise to national prominence tend to be eccentric billionaires on very expensive ego trips. Remember Ross Perot? In today’s dollars, he spent almost $100 million of his own wealth, but he ultimately received zero Electoral College votes in his quixotic 1992 bid for the presidency. He did take 19 percent of the popular vote, making him the most successful third-party candidate since 1912. That was the year popular former president Theodore Roosevelt took a losing 27 percent of the vote as a Progressive Party candidate.

  Like it or not, the two major parties currently control almost every single elected office in the country, from president to Congress, state legislatures, city councils, and town assemblies. We can safely predict, without fear of embarrassment, that either Republicans or Democrats will control the U.S. House and Senate in 2010 and the White House in 2012. Even when third-party candidates win—like former socialist Bernie Sanders from Vermont and former Democrat Joe Lieberman from Connecticut—it is under special circumstances and they will have to choose to caucus with one of the major parties anyway.

  It is within the parties where would-be third-party candidates are making the biggest difference. Dennis Kucinich is perhaps the best-known “progressive” in Congress, but he’s not elected on the Progressive Party ticket. He’s a Democrat. And Ron Paul is the most successful libertarian in Congress; he’s doing important work to rein in the Federal Reserve, but he’s only ever been elected to hold public office as a Republican. When he ran on the Libertarian Party ticket, he lost.

  As the Libertarian and Green parties’ lack of representation at the federal level demonstrates, it is very difficult and can take a long time to build up the party infrastructure necessary to take control of Congress. Most important, every hour spent doing so would be one less hour than we can afford to lose in the fight to take America back from the big spenders in Washington, D.C.

  WHEN DICK ARMEY LEFT his position as a university professor and chair of the economics department in 1983, he decided to run for Congress. At the time he had no party affiliation and zero party loyalty and had not paid a moment’s notice to the practice of politics in almost twenty years. He considered politics a curious form of juvenile delinquency. Politicians, in his limited experience, were shortsighted and self-serving, like undisciplined children.

  But if he was going to run for Congress he had to choose a political party. Which one? He chose the Republican Party because he had seen, on several important occasions during his own life, Republicans rise to meet his expectations. Barry Goldwater demonstrated a refreshing fidelity to the principles of freedom and a palpable respect for our founders and the entrepreneurial genius of our Constitution. Discovering his principled campaign for president in 1964 was Dick’s political birth; he was a “Goldwater Baby.”

  When Barry Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson, Dick decided that principled people who stood for sound economic principles, personal liberty, and limited government could not possibly get elected. So he put politics aside and went to work, which he did for the next two decades. However, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980, he recognized that Reagan combined the same principles that had animated Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign with resounding political success. President Reagan proved that you could win as a Republican by boldly offering voters a positive vision for America based on the principles of lower taxes, less government, and more freedom.

  Today we certainly harbor our bitter disappointments with the Republican blunders that led to a Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006 and the White House in 2008. But those shining moments when the Republican Party embraced a national vision for America based on the principles of individual liberty and government restraint remind us that there is hope. There was hope with Goldwater and real change with Reagan. Republicans stood for something worthy again in 1994 with the Contract with America.

  PROGRESSIVELY PROGRESSIVE

  TODAY’S DEMOCRATS HAVE EFFECTIVELY silenced the fiscal conservatives in their caucus with a Far Left agenda of tax-and-spend policies that are anathema to a commonsense middle built around government restraint. Today’s Democratic Party is not much more than a coalition of special interests that want something from government. They want a program, an earmark, a regulation, favored treatment, or, if possible, a handout.

  We have little hope that the Democrats could serve our positive vision for America. We despair over the state of that party. Moreover, it’s too late—the “progressive movement” has already spent the past century taking over the Democratic Party.

  Understanding how the Far Left hijacked the Democratic Party is instructive. The progressive movement in the United States began during the late 1800s and argued that government should get involved in making life “fair” and “equal” by mandating higher wages and shorter working hours, offering welfare, and curing social ills through alcohol prohibition, among other things. Progressives called for top-down solutions—using the force of the state to require everyone in society to behave as they desired—but politically, they used a bottom-up approach in local elections.

  By the 1910s, progressives had become a substantial force. Buoyed by their inflated view of their own importance, they made a critical mistake that the Tea Party movement must avoid. Rather than taking over one of the two major parties, they decided to form a new party to run their own candidates. In 1912, the Progressive Party was formed7 and created a platform that went by a name that may sound familiar to you: the Contract with the People. They ran popular former president Theodore Roosevelt as their candidate for president. Even with one of the faces that ended up on Mount Rushmore as their candidate and decades of local campaign experience, they were only able to win 8 electoral votes to Woodrow Wilson’s 435. Over the course of a decade, they put one governor, one U.S. senator, and just thirteen U.S. House members in office8. That’s 50 short of a majority in the Senate and 205 short of one in the House—which is to say, a colossal waste of time.

  The Progressive Party faded away, but its ideas did not. By the 1930s, legendary progressive leader Saul Alinsky began organizing and training activists to be more effective. His goal was to organize a mass army of people from the community to pressure politicians into supporting “progressive” policies. Rather than spend time creating a new political party, he was going to spend his time more effectively and take over the existing structure. Alinsky—one of the original “community organizers”—is widely known as one of President Obama’s greatest intellectual inspirations and the source of many of his organizing tactics. Alinsky’s guide to being an effective activist is called Rules for Radicals. We’ve all read it at FreedomWorks and suggest you do, too.

  The political landscape was changed as progressives influenced Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, helping him pass the New Deal and select Supreme Court justices who argued for a “living constitution” that evolved with the times. P
rogressives continued their powerful influence over Democrats by mobilizing and campaigning for Democrat Lyndon Johnson and his plan to redistribute wealth through his “Great Society.” With the New Deal and the Great Society, progressives succeeded in dramatically expanding the government’s reach.

  This massive burden of government produced the economic stagnation of the 1970s, and it seemed as though the progressive movement’s political power had waned with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and ’84, the election of Bill Clinton from the more moderate “New Democrat” wing of the party, and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. But they never quit; they were quietly, continuously building their ranks within the Democratic Party.

  In 1985, in the middle of Reagan’s presidency, Democratic activist Ellen Malcolm formed the political action committee EMILY’s List, which describes itself as “a community of progressive Americans” committed to electing women who shared their philosophy of expansive government. Malcolm noticed there were only two women in the U.S. Senate at the time and both were Republicans. To do something about it, she gathered twenty-four women in her basement to come up with an action plan to elect more Democratic women who supported their issues.

  This network of women created the political powerhouse EMILY’s List PAC. The list immediately started to produce money, which was sent to candidates the women liked. One year later, EMILY’s List candidate Barbara Mikulski of Maryland became the first woman Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate.

  In 1991 self-described socialist Bernie Sanders of Vermont formed the Congressional Progressive Caucus along with five other House Democrats. They set out to push, among other things, higher taxes, more welfare, and “universal health care.” In 1992 EMILY’s List’s membership grew by more than 600 percent and raised $10.2 million to help engineer what political scientists now call “The Year of the Woman.”9 Four new Democratic women were elected to the Senate along with twenty women to the House of Representatives, including several who joined the Congressional Progressive Caucus. EMILY’s List had succeeded in becoming the first PAC to raise significant funds through small donations to change the political landscape.

  In the late 1990s EMILY’s List was joined by other progressive grassroots groups, including MoveOn.org, an early pioneer of effective online activism. At the beginning of President George W. Bush’s first term, MoveOn.org was smaller than FreedomWorks currently is. But it grew so fast over the intervening years that by the 2004 election it had almost 700,000 donating members10 who gave an average financial contribution of $43.31 for a total of $32 million raised to defeat Republican candidates.

  In the 2006 elections, progressive groups like EMILY’s List and MoveOn.org worked together through the Democratic Party to take back control of Congress from the Republicans. There are now eighty-three Democratic members in the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC)—up from just six in 1991—making it the largest caucus within the Democratic Party in the U.S. Congress. That means the CPC has a big say in who runs the House. EMILY’s List–sponsored Far Left Rep. Nancy Pelosi is the Speaker of the House. Of the twenty standing committees in the House of Representatives, half of them are chaired by CPC members. EMILY’s List’s progressive candidates also now hold governorships and cabinet positions. MoveOn.org knew it had a strong progressive candidate in Barack Obama and broke tradition by endorsing and campaigning hard for him in the Democratic primary over Hillary Clinton.

  Founder Ellen Malcolm credits the PAC’s powerful influence along with EMILY’s List member Nancy Pelosi for the passage of health care reform. According to Malcolm, “In only twelve elections, you and I through EMILY’s list have literally changed the face of power in America.”11

  Without progressives like Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama running Washington, and eighty-three progressive members in the CPC, the $786 billion government stimulus would not have passed. Neither would have government-run health care. We would not face trillion-dollar deficits. Even the Wall Street bailout would not have passed without the support of key progressives such as President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Rep. Barney Frank.

  FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE

  THE LESSON FOR FISCAL conservatives is to get involved. Together, we can do the same for limited government as they’ve done for expanded government. By getting together with our friends, maybe in our basements like Malcolm and her friends, we can build large networks of individuals who each give a little time and money toward the goal of taking over the Republican Party. Together, it adds up to lots of time, lots of money, lots of influence, and, ultimately, a return to a government of, for, and by the people.

  That’s the only way this works—not from the top down, but from a broad network of like-minded individuals all doing a little more for their democracy through an existing party infrastructure. Having been to many town hall meetings, tea parties, rallies, protests, and marches over the past year, we know there are more than enough people on our side who can build a powerful network going into the 2010 fall election season and beyond.

  The “progressives” worked hard and succeeded in enacting their big-government agenda. We can do the same with an equal commitment to good ideas and hard work and effective organization.

  We should start by replacing those in the Republican establishment who don’t agree with fiscal conservatives who are willing to cut spending and shrink government. Then we need to be there 365 days a year to keep them from joining the go-along-to-get-along club once they get to Washington—which goes along spending our money to get a long list of big-money contributors to their campaigns.

  This is precisely where our movement has failed in the past. We’ve long discounted the value—and the work involved—in organizing taxpayers to protest out-of-control spending and the growth of government. “Our side doesn’t do that,” skeptics often said. “They have jobs and families.” Instead, fiscal conservatives built world-class think tanks in the belief that our ideas were so powerful that simply being right would win the public policy battles.

  The incentives are the opposite for the big-money contributors we’re fighting. Washington lobbying is currently the best return on investment going, and not just because the stock market is in the tank. The federal government controls the spending of trillions of dollars every year. So big business, big labor, trial lawyers, and other well-heeled interests spend lavishly on lobbying, with the expectation that it will more than come back to them in the form of government handouts and subsidies.

  Take the Wall Street bailout, for example. The Center for Responsive Politics reported in February 2009 that the “companies that have been awarded taxpayers’ money12 from Congress’s bailout bill spent $77 million on lobbying and $37 million on federal campaign contributions. . . . The return on investment: 258,449 percent.” Sheila Krumholz, the center’s executive director, commented, “Even in the best economic times13, you won’t find an investment with a greater payoff than what these companies have been getting. Some of the companies and industries that have received payments may now consider their contributions and lobbying to be the smartest investments they’ve made in years.”

  Without a doubt, this is exploitation of the many by the few.

  Usually, Big Government and Big Business get away with this because the cost per taxpayer is too small for us to believe it is worth fighting over. Economists call this the “collective action” problem. It’s all about concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. This idea was first spelled out by Mancur Olson, who said, “The taxpayers are a vast group14 with an obvious common interest, but in an important sense they have yet to obtain representation. The consumers are at least as numerous as any other group in the society, but they have no organization to countervail the power of organized monopolistic producers. . . . There are vast numbers who have a common interest in preventing inflation and depression, but they have no organization to express that interest.”

  So if the Tea Party movement wants to be politically effective in turning an ethos into
public policy, we need to take over the Republican Party. By seizing control of the party, we can spend our time focused on ideas and use the party infrastructure that has been built over the past 156 years. And among the two parties the Republicans have at least at times been on the side of fiscal restraint and already have some of us in their ranks.

  Notice that we call for a hostile takeover. We didn’t say “join the Republican Party.” We need to take it over. The commonsense values that define the Tea Party movement, like the belief that government should not spend money it does not have, puts us in the broad middle of American politics. That means the existing parties, if they covet the votes of this broad constituency, need to gravitate toward our values and our issues to get elected.

  TESTING THE THEORY

  OUR STRATEGY WAS PUT to the test soon enough. On September 29, 2009, New York governor David Patterson announced that a special election would be held on November 3 to fill a recently vacated U.S. House seat in the 23rd District. This was the same day that New Jersey and Virginia would elect their governors.

  We, along with nearly a million activists who had joined together for the historic 9/12 March on Washington, were still smiling about what we had accomplished together. Hadn’t this united demonstration of grassroots resolve sent a powerful message to Democrats and Republicans alike? Things now would change, wouldn’t they?

  New York law does not allow for primaries in special elections to fill vacant House seats. Instead, party leaders handpick the candidate. The Republican establishment—eleven committee chairmen in closed-door conclave—had anointed state assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava. Considered “electable,” she was so left-leaning on core economic issues that she was virtually indistinguishable from her liberal Democratic opponent. Scozzafava supported Obama’s government stimulus bill, the union-favored “card check” bill to end secret ballots in the workplace, and a government takeover of health care.