Rallying for a Better Future

by John Hood, Carolina Journal, April 18, 2011

http://www.carolinajournal.com/jhdailyjournal/display_jhdailyjournal.html?id=7651
RALEIGH – Is the Tea Party movement kaput?

The Left would dearly love for the answer to be yes. But it’s not.

Beginning as a spontaneous reaction to fiscal insanity in Washington – to billion-dollar bailouts and trillion-dollar deficits – the Tea Party movement mobilized millions of activists and voters, created new organizations and breathed new life into existing ones, and added a broader range of federal, state, and local issues to the nation’s political agenda, such as renewing constitutional limits on federal power.

Without Tea Party activists, neither party – that’s right, neither party – would currently be proposing plans to cut trillions of dollars from the federal budget over the next decade. Neither party would be proposing fundamental tax reform based on broader bases, lower rates, and the end of long-running distortions in the tax code. Neither party would be proposing major changes to Medicare, Medicaid, and other unaffordable entitlements.

And while then-Democratic Washington enacted ObamaCare last year despite the strenuous objections of Tea Party voters, it’s likely that without their presence in the debate the opposition to the president’s federal takeover of health care finance and regulation would have been less unified – and current litigation to overturn the individual mandate would include fewer states as plaintiffs.

Tea Party voters proved to be a major asset for conservative politicians last fall. Yes, there were a few places where Tea Party-backed candidates lost elections that mushy moderates might have won. But there were many more places where Tea Party voters turned out in unprecedented numbers to propel fiscal conservatives into office for the first time in generations.

North Carolina was one of those places. Running primarily on fiscal issues, Republicans captured a congressional seat, kept a Senate seat, won legislative majorities for the first time since 1870, and achieved parity in county-commission seats for the first time ever.

The Tea Party movement made history. And it is far from being history.

Over the weekend, thousands of local activists held Tax Day Tea Party rallies in more than a dozen communities across North Carolina. More than a thousand showed up in Raleigh alone at two downtown events on Friday afternoon. Hundreds more showed up at each of several other events on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday in cities from Wilmington and Morehead City on the coast to Waynesville and Morganton in the west, and many points in-between. Even news of the approaching storms on Saturday, while probably dampening turnout in some places, didn’t deter Tea Party leaders from carrying out their plans.

At the rallies, activists celebrated their accomplishments to date and observed how much more work needs to be done to restore fiscal responsibility, economic vitality, and our traditions of liberty in North Carolina and the nation.

Was there some frustration with the pace of change? Naturally. All political movements experience it. It’s always easier to describe a reform agenda in theory than it is to implement it in practice. Still, with legislative majorities in North Carolina promise to balance the state budget without tax hikes and conservative leaders in Washington proposing such innovative ideas as block grants for Medicaid and a competitive premium-support plan for Medicare, it would be hard to conclude that progress is invisible or impossible.

The main message from this weekend’s rallies is that, in North Carolina at least, the Tea Party movement is not going away. The fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush era and the fiscal insanity of the Obama era have combined to create a new force that will influence electoral politics and public policy for the foreseeable future.

Ready or not, here they come.

** John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.