I would see my liberal friends use the most vicious, hateful, sexist words about conservative women. I was no Sarah Palin fan, but one day this feminist bookstore owner called her the “c word” at a reading and I stood up and said, “As a feminist, I can’t accept you using that term about another woman.” I got booed, and the woman hissed at me, “That conservative bitch isn’t a woman!” The feminists all clapped. It was crazy to me.
I would have loved to see their faces when President Marlowe appointed Ambassador Palin to the United Nations and she told those crooks and thugs to shape up or ship out of New York City!
I knew something had changed in me. I hadn’t changed any of my core principles. I think the thing is—and I saw this with a lot of liberals who became constitutional conservatives—is that I actually believed in all that stuff about treating people fairly and equally and about civil rights and so forth. But a lot of liberals seemed to think those principles were only important as long as they helped liberalism. When they didn’t help, they abandoned them. The liberals were leaving me, not vice versa.
I was a big pro-choice supporter, but I never thought abortion was right for me. I wasn’t going to judge others, but for me, I just wasn’t going to have one. Then I got pregnant, and I naturally decided I was going to keep the baby. I thought that being pro-choice meant that I had a right to choose, but when I said why I chose to have my daughter even though I was very poor and fairly young—and suggested that other people should try to do the same, even if inconvenient—you’d think I had just burned a cross. I guess they were all for choice if you chose their way.
Suddenly, I had feminists telling me that I was somehow betraying feminist principles by having the baby. It seemed like it was important to them that I atone for not being more than just pro-choice. They had forgiven me for defending Sarah Palin, but I finally got kicked out of the feminist bookstore reading club for good for that.
And it wasn’t just the feminists. This environmentalist feminist I knew named Gaia Borgnine—I don’t know if that was her real name—actually came up to me in my shop and told me having a child was an “Earthcrime.” I asked whether I was going to be arrested by the “Earthcops,” and she said, “If I had my way, you would be!”
These people were nuts. And dangerous.
I started reading and learning about the people I had always held in contempt. It took a while, but after finding that liberal “freedom” was really no freer than the caricature of conservatism I had grown up believing in, I committed the ultimate act of defiance. I started my own Tea Party group, and I used the name “Tea Party” explicitly to confront the haters. And there were plenty. Of course, being Portland, I emphasized that the tea was locally sourced.
Chapter Two: Guerrilla Politics
Success in the political realm was not sufficient for victory, but it was necessary for victory. Conservative politicians were under fire not only from the Democrats but from establishment Republicans, as well as the media. Not yet strong enough to pass any initiatives on their own, they moved into the guerrilla mode of defeating their opponents’ attempt to govern. Using spectacle to highlight establishment weakness, and choosing fights where they had a good chance of winning, constitutional conservatives began to exercise a power beyond their relatively limited size. Leveraging grassroots enthusiasm and making use of the sanctuary of the states (where much of the work of the conservative comeback took place), conservatives began to shape the battlefield for eventual victory.
Tony “Gator” McCoy (Chief Advisor to President Carrie Marlowe)
Gator McCoy played football at Florida State, where he majored in cheap beer and right-wing activism. A shattered knee put him on the sidelines, but his keen, competitive drive found a new outlet: politics. Starting out as a Sunshine State campaign prodigy winning elections that the establishment had written off, he built a wide network of contacts within the constitutional conservative movement. The network paid off when Carrie Marlowe brought him on board to manage her run for governor in 2018 and her eventual run for the White House in 2024.
It’s only 10:30 in the morning when Gator guides me out to his back porch and cracks a Budweiser. I decline his third wife’s offer of a brew—at 30, she is half his age—and take a seat. Gator kicks off his flip-flops and puts up his feet.
After the 2012 election, the weenies of the GOP started looking around for an excuse for their screw-ups—of course, their defeat couldn’t be because of their milquetoast policies and Beltway worldview. Oh no, it had to be, uh… who? Why, those conservatives! Oh, and also a lack of inclusiveness—which, of course, just happened to dovetail with their own preconceived, establishment notions about immigration. They blamed everyone and everything but themselves.
There was something to be said for expanding the GOP voter base, but it wasn’t being said by the establishment. Their big contribution to the discussion was the bright idea that if us crazy constitutional conservatives would simply adopt the Beltway consensus on immigration, Latinos would come rushing into the GOP from their Democrat home because, well, uh… See, they never had a good answer.
Oh, I raised hell with them. I was challenging their shaky premises and asking simple questions like “Why do you believe that is true?” when I was supposed to sit back and let the geniuses who brought us winners like McCain and Romney tell me what to think.
No friggin’ way!
Florida was always a big melting pot, so I know something about appealing to different voting blocs. I tried to tell them that networking was not about taking a look at a census spreadsheet and pointing to a category like “Hispanics” and saying, “Let’s target them!” Leaving aside that “Latinos,” “Hispanics,” or whatever they were being called are not some sort of homogenous voting bloc, the whole thing was totally unconservative.
We conservatives weren’t about appealing to people based on where their grandfather came from. We were supposed to be appealing to them because they love the values embodied in our Constitution!
I tried to tell the establishment, “Hey, we aren’t liberals!” They wouldn’t listen. Too dug in. Too entrenched. Too stupid.
I quit my GOP establishment job in DC and went home to Tampa. I found good candidates in tough races and helped them win by running as constitutional conservatives. When I ran a campaign, from city council to president, I wanted to sneak in and steal the Democrat base. I wanted to come in under the cover of darkness and rob ’em blind. I felt like a Viet Cong guy in a polo shirt and Dockers.
But networking into groups we had ignored wasn’t going to work if we tried to do it based on gimmicks like an amnesty immigration bill. Seriously, where was the one “Latino” anywhere who had ever been caught on video saying, “Why yes, if the GOP copies the Democrats on immigration I’ll immediately start voting Republican for some reason”?
Never happened before, and when they finally pushed it through, it still didn’t happen.
I got my candidates to aim at people who agreed with our principles but who, because of habits associated with their race, ethnicity, affinity, or whatever, would not support our Republican candidates. And we needed to keep clear-eyed understanding of what we meant by “principles.” The nonsense about how Hispanics were somehow inherently conservative because they are “pro-family” and religious was the kind of fuzzy, half-assed thinking our establishment overlords always confused with strategy.