“The nation is threatened by evils greater than those of any war.”- Theodore Roosevelt, on the 1896 Presidential election
Last week, I spoke of the possibility of the reinvigoration of the Tea Party through President Obama’s contraception mandate. The President has already recognized the political peril of this position and has chosen to walk it back, placing the onus of contraception coverage on the insurance companies. While the legality of the government ordering private insurance companies to cover birth control costs is another article for a more learned writer (perfect timing Dr. Krauthammer) this issue should still serve as a serious building block in the reinvigoration of the Tea Party.
In the fifty years he lived after writing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson often referred to the “Spirit of ‘76” in his personal correspondence. This adage was a reference to the values American citizens fought and died for in the Revolutionary War. It was used in Mr. Jefferson’s correspondence with friends and fellow statesmen to express his concerns over an increasingly centralized and powerful federal government. Today, many republicans in the wake of the primary season have had the same feeling. But instead of ’76, they long for the spirit of ’10.
In the 2010 election cycle, the President’s statist agenda was repudiated by what he called a serious “shellacking.” Republicans won 63 seats in the House of Representatives, marking the single greatest gain in an election in over half a century. Of course, when the President acknowledged his party’s defeat he blamed the poor economy, not his policies, over the huge election loss. But the roar of dissent would have never been heard if not for the bullhorn that was the Tea Party, a faction of citizens that would not have been formed if not for ‘Obamacare.’
After the passage of more TARP, bank bailouts, and then finally Obamacare, the Tea Party was formed to take to the streets and protest the intrusive policies of the government. Obamacare was the icing on the government’s layered cake of poor choices: it mandated citizens buy health care insurance no matter the situation, and essentially facilitated a government takeover of 1/6 of the economy. The President had overreached with his agenda, and long after passing a $700B stimulus bill to “save” the economy, Obamacare pushed the Tea Partiers to the brink.
They were loud and they were organized. And they were legally demonstrative, unlike their ‘OWS’ counterparts. They forced not only Democrats, but more importantly Republicans, to rethink their positions concerning government spending and its role in the lives of the citizenry. The Tea Party’s influence on primary elections forced RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) out of contests to make way for true conservatives to effect change in our reckless federal government. While there were some big misses (see: Angle, Sharron and O’Donnell, Christine), there were even bigger hits, like Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. The former, who now serves as conservatism’s standard bearer in the Senate, would not have made it there without the help of Tea Party’s grassroots support in his bid to replace Republican and former Florida governor, Charlie Crist. Mr. Rubio’s emphasis on limited government and a grounded approach to cutting the deficit was fueled by the Tea Party’s discontent. Crist represented the ‘business as usual approach’ in Washington that this faction of patriots had come to despise. The Tea Party scored big in 2010, and its help is needed again.
As reported this week, President Obama is now at the 50% mark in public approval ratings. This has always been considered the threshold in polling for a President to have a chance at reelection. The lack of caliber in the Republican candidate roster has left the public, Republican and otherwise, longing for leadership. Both Romney and Santorum trail the President in the polls in head to head matchups by considerable, albeit fluctuating, margins. The Tea Party has not showed up in these primaries because there is no one worth showing up for. This fact is undeniable, but not all is lost. The key here is that once the candidate is chosen to represent the Republican Party, the Tea Party must raise up against the President despite whatever feelings they may have toward the challenger.
Regardless of his increase in approval ratings, the President is the same man he was in 2010. Obamacare is still here, and has already made its first real mark on the public with the contraception fiasco last week. The President has presented a new budget to Congress that will have a deficit over $1 trillion, breaking his campaign promise to cut the debt in half his first four years (he will have actually increased the debt held by the United States by a total of 5 trillion dollars in four years). The President may try to distract the electorate by blaming their woes on the wealthy; he may try to make us believe his actions will not accelerate our descent into fiscal insolvency; he may even try to make us believe he hasn’t been President the last three years, and will continue his campaign against a “do-nothing congress.” But the evidence is there, and the Tea Party must use that as fuel to ignite its protests, as it did in 2010. We are currently seeing a fire burning, but it is in the streets of Athens as Greece’s finances and standing in the world seems to disintegrate before our eyes. The Tea Party not only possesses evidence of the President’s agenda in his legislative actions, but it also has a real and disturbing precedent across the Atlantic as to the effect it will have on the country.
The quote in the title above was written by Theodore Roosevelt before he was a major player in national politics; he conveyed this thought to his sister in a letter after the country had been rocked by a serious depression and was facing a new presidential election. Today, the crisis we face is an all-encompassing debt that will drain our markets, bankrupt our children, and finally stab a dagger into the heart of democracy. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and the bill the President has racked up for our generation is a hefty one. The United States would finally be exposed as a society of charlatans; a people who chose to abuse their freedom to vote by enabling politicians to grant them endless entitlement benefits at the expense of the future of this nation. The Tea Party helped delay that course with its work in 2010. If it does in fact return for this election, one day we may all fondly reminisce over the Spirit of ‘12.
– John P. Burns
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