So, we saw ourselves as a resource helping constitutional conservatives at every level with articulating their views and organizing for success. I worked for candidates from senators down to, literally, a dogcatcher. Really, a dogcatcher. I’m not even sure which organization it was—I think it was before I moved to FreedomWorks—that sent me to help this conservative candidate for director of animal control for some county in Colorado. These pushy liberal vegan activists were trying to take over the job, which is an important job in a semirural area. I mean, it was important enough that it was an elected office there. Anyway, this guy was a manager at a grocery store and a Tea Party activist who had started off working to recall some gun-banning state senators. Well, he saw this going on, and he liked animals, so he ran, but he didn’t know anything. I got sent out to help him, and he ended up winning.
Sure, dogcatcher is a pretty minor office, but here’s the thing. It was a stepping-stone. We were building a constitutional conservative farm team. He got elected dogcatcher in 2018. He’s a conservative congressman now.
We tried to get our candidates to think strategically. The challenge was that the Tea Party brought in a lot of amateurs, people with no political experience. But that was also a good thing because we could start fresh with them and not have to waste time breaking bad habits. This was definitely not true about the pros, or alleged pros. They thought they knew everything, which was true—if you were talking about getting your butt kicked by liberals. They were experts at that.
We tried to get them to avoid issues that required compromise, which they resisted. They would talk about this nebulous need to “solve problems,” not realizing that you weren’t going to solve any problems while liberals were in control. You were only going to put off the final collapse of liberalism. Our job during the Obama and Clinton years was not “good government.” It was destroying the liberal cancer plaguing our government at every level.
We pushed them to choose smaller issues that we could win, that would embarrass the opposition or at least jam a wedge between their key constituencies. The best issues led to concrete wins for us.
For example, we tried to get them to make sure that any kind of “gun violence” proposal included amendments that required liberals to go on record supporting or opposing the individual right to keep and bear arms. If we won, we strengthened the right to keep and bear arms. If we lost, we at least outed the liberals who liked to pretend to be protecting gun rights for the benefit of the voters back home in red states. We looked for these win-wins.
There were a lot of old white guys who were the face of conservatism. Now, I like old white guys. My dad was an old white guy. But there was a lot more to the constitutional conservative movement than old white guys. Hell, the original Tea Party—okay, not the original original Tea Party—was led primarily by women. There was nothing wrong with who they were. It just presented a distorted view of who we were as a movement.
So, we pushed local groups and candidates to put females out there to talk about how women benefited by conservative policies. For example, guns were supposed to crush us with women. The GOP experts said it was a toxic issue—women hated guns. The liberals certainly thought women hated guns and were afraid of guns and would vote like zombies for anyone saying he hated guns. We must not have known the same women.
When we talked guns to women, we emphasized that they needed the right to have weapons to protect themselves from rape and to protect their kids from whatever hideous fate the thugs liberals won’t lock up would inflict. When liberals started babbling that guns are more dangerous to their owners—which is nonsense, but facts never stopped them—then we would demand that Democrats stop telling women what women need. We invented a catchphrase, “We can choose for ourselves!” and it just infuriated the liberals.
We pushed them to start passing laws and statutes that made the liberals squirm. We did that at every level, from city council to Senate.
The possibilities were endless. We were the ones who started pushing for laws that set the expectation that able-bodied Americans will support themselves. The American people loved it—at least the majority that worked to support itself—and it infuriated the liberals who had to block them and explain their votes later. This idea actually sowed the seeds for the Thirty-Second Amendment.
We pushed for restrictions on lobbying designed to keep politicians and their staffers from cashing in. That was really popular with voters, but the liberals hated it—it was a threat to their power base. Sure, some GOP hacks got squishy about it, but we pointed out that no liberal president like Obama or Hillary would ever sign these bills even if the Democrats let them pass Congress. The liberals became the ones stopping commonsense reforms, not us!
Oh, and we used the phrase “common sense” all the time. Liberals hated having to take positions against “common sense.” Wherever we had control—county boards of supervisors, state assemblies, the House of Representatives—we would advise our people to pass bill after bill that embraced good, old-fashioned common sense—in the most covertly partisan manner possible.
We weren’t bipartisan. We were about destroying our opponents, flat out. After all, our opponents were looking to destroy us. They even tried to outlaw us with the “campaign reform” laws under Hillary Clinton. It was sickening that you could actually be put in jail for advocating your views, but that was liberalism.
This was a fight to the death, and it was important that our people understand that and not pine for some bogus bipartisan fantasy world of the past. We needed to install the killer instinct into some of these people. The people who came in as candidates inspired by the Tea Party were okay. They wanted to draw political blood, and they understood that it was a death match with liberalism. The moderates, the squishes —well, they did not understand that the liberals would take their goo-goo, cloying nonsense about “good government” and turn it into liberalism.
We needed to teach them to say “No” to all manner of liberal nonsense. There could be no compromise with progressivism, just “No.” I got furious at one whiny congressman who was babbling to me about compromising on something and I shouted, “Getting half a shit sandwich still means you’re getting a shit sandwich!” It scared him into voting the right way. That and the fact that I told him I was going to go find a primary opponent for him if he didn’t.
It was hard to get some of them to reject the shit sandwich. A lot of them were perfectly happy holding office in a permanent minority. When you expect to lose all the time, it’s a lot lower stress than when you expect to have to fight for your principles every day.
We had to turn around a lot of losses. Even after Obama was reelected and started to melt down with Obamacare and the budget and Iran, we found ourselves still having to fight to just keep the House. The bipartisan, good governance idiots shoved through the immigration amnesty bill. We didn’t take the Senate, which was ours for the taking, and nearly lost the House. What were they thinking going against something the conservative base made absolutely clear was a deal breaker? Our people were disgusted—and rightly so—and so they stayed home. They only came back when we primaried the bastards who sold us out in 2016.