Don’t Fear the People

Pundette highlights this quote from Peter Wehner:

The populist, anti-Washington wave out there, which is already quite large, will only grow, and grow, and grow.

And who saw this coming? Did David Brooks or Kathleen Parker or George Will or Ross Douthat tell you about it? Let’s take a trip back in time, starting with the Wall Street bailout, and my coverage of the grassroots opposition, beginning Sept. 30, 2008, when I wrote “Libertarian Populism” for The American Spectator:

Populist resentment can be understood as the natural response of citizens toward a government that has lost credibility. Just as the loss of credibility for Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” in the 1960s created a populist backlash, a similar response has been generated by the crumbling credibility of Bush’s “Compassionate Conservatism.” . . .
So extreme is the government’s credibility shortage that even dire warnings of economic collapse failed to stir popular support for a taxpayer rescue of the financial industry. One poll last week found only 25 percent of voters favored the bailout plan. . . .
Many of those denouncing the bailout did so in libertarian terms that would have warmed Ayn Rand’s heart. “Privatizing profits and socializing losses on a scale we have never seen before in our lifetimes,” Michelle Malkin said in reaction to the Sept. 19 press conference where Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson announced the plan. “The fundamentals of capitalism have been sabotaged.”

Of course, we know which popular Republican was emblematic of the incipient populist mood, as I reported Oct. 31, 2008, for The American Spectator:

George F. Will, Ken Adelman, Frank Fukuyama, David Brooks — these are just a few names on the list of eminent experts who have declared that Sarah Palin is what’s wrong with the Republican Party.
Even if we were to add all their prestigious names to the list, however, it wouldn’t be nearly as long as the line of people who stood in the cold wind of Pennsylvania to see Palin this week.
The line outside the Heiges Field House at Shippensburg University was already growing long by noon, more than two hours before the doors opened for a Tuesday rally that wasn’t scheduled to start until 5 p.m. . . .
Dressed in parkas or hooded sweatshirts, wearing toboggans or wrapped in blankets, they withstood an 18-mph October wind as the late afternoon turned to evening and the temperature dipped toward freezing. One tall young man held his tiny infant daughter snuggled up inside his coat. “She’s all right,” he said. “She’s a Republican.”

“Rousing the Rabble,” The American Spectator, Dec. 23, 2008:

Democrats clearly aim to expand this gap between the perception and reality of Sarah Palin by making her an all-purpose symbol of right-wing menace, an emblem of “oogedy boogedy,” to borrow Kathleen Parker’s evocative epithet. . . .
Team Sarah “has been such an organic phenomenon . . . utterly grassroots.” The group has no official relationship with Palin, except as a “fan club,” [Marjorie] Dannenfelser explained.
“A lot of [Team Sarah members] are people who’ve never been involved in politics before,” Dannenfelser said, describing how many of those supporters feel “inspired and uplifted” by Palin.

It wasn’t just Palin, but everyone in the conservative grassroots, who were targeted by those elitist “oogedy-boogedy” attacks on Team Sarah. And who can forget the “right-wing extremist” smear against the embryonic Tea Party movement?

Stephen Gordon has obtained a new Department of Homeland Security report provocatively entitled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Environment Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” . . .
This is a conspiracy so immense . . . as to involve Mark Krikorian, David Boaz, Antonin Scalia, and just about everyone who didn’t vote for Obama in November.

And who made fun of the DHS fearmongers at the April 15 Birmingham Tea Party? (Note the pitchfork waving in the background.)

Who are these Tea Party crowds? Well, they’re kind of like a certain Ohio plumber. “The Ordinary American,” The American Spectator, May 7:

Despite the elite consensus — which is so influential in New York, Hollywood and Washington, D.C. — the average resident of Lucas County, Ohio, probably agrees with [Joe] Wurzelbacher.
Joe the Plumber is an Ordinary American, someone whose existence is lived outside the world where elite opinion is ubiquitous and omnipotent.

The elite believe they can dictate their decisions and then expect the faceless “masses” to obey. They found out otherwise when John Cornyn and the National Republican Senatorial Committee tried to put the fix in for Charlie Crist in Florida:

Conservative activists are sparking an online grassroots uprising in response to the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s decision to endorse Charlie Crist in the 2010 Florida Senate race 15 months before the GOP primary for the seat . . .
Erick Erickson, CEO of the popular RedState.com site, invited fellow conservatives to join a Facebook group vowing “Not One Penny to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.” RightWingNews.com founder John Hawkins called for Texas Sen. John Cornyn to resign as chairman of the NRSC. . . .
“The NRSC endorsing Charlie Crist, the man Barack Obama calls his favorite Republican, sends a strong signal that the NRSC believes it can take the GOP base’s money, then tell them to shut up,” Erickson said. “It is an admission that the Senate Republicans, after two back to back disasters, have yet to properly diagnose their problems.”

The populist mood simmered all summer. I spoke at the Richmond Tea Party in July, and attended the Right Online conference in August, where I met Barbara Espinosa of American Freedom blog fame. “Grandma Is an Angry Mob,” The American Spectator, Aug. 18:

Tom’s Tavern in Phoenix was “packed to the rafters” Monday morning, Barbara Espinosa told me. “You could hardly move.”
The tavern was the scene of a “Health Care Town Hall” event hosted by J.D. Hayworth, the former Arizona Republican congressman who is now a popular talk radio host on KFYI in Phoenix.
President Obama was in town to address the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Ms. Espinosa was a member of the crowd who marched from Tom’s Tavern to the Phoenix Convention Center to welcome the president, carrying signs with slogans like, “Pull the Plug on ObamaCare” and “Marx Was Not a Founding Father.”

Then came the Big One, the 9/12 March on Washington. Barbara Espinosa phoned in the “people meter” estimate of 450,000 in the march to the Capitol, and I reported from the scene for Pajamas Media:

Standing beside the stage Saturday afternoon in his trademark black leather jacket, Nick Gillespie of the libertarian journal Reason agreed that, whether or not this event had established a Washington record for attendance at a political rally, it certainly deserved Guinness Book recognition as history’s largest mass display of the Gadsden flag.
While the crowd estimate was furiously debated online, the people who turned out for the March on D.C. — not figments of anyone’s imagination, but flesh-and-blood Americans whom I saw, spoke to, and even sometimes shook hands with — were unanimously agreed that they’d never seen anything so huge. However much critics want to denounce the sponsorship as “corporate” (by which liberals mean “phony,” if not indeed “evil”), the crowd was real. And it was spectacular.

The spectacular crowd at the Capitol demonstrated the fired-up mood of the grassroots, who made a big difference in Doug Hoffman’s surge that drove RINO Dede Scozzafava out of the NY23 special election campaign, as I reported in the December-January print edition of The American Spectator:

In the second week of October, with the help of a conference call organized by the American Conservative Union’s political action committee, Hoffman’s campaign began getting a drumbeat of coverage from conservative bloggers. On October 16, the same day a poll showed Hoffman as having crossed the 20 percent threshold considered essential to a successful third-party campaign, Michelle Malkin devoted her syndicated column to denouncing Scozzafava as an “ACORN-Friendly, Big Labor-Backing, Tax-and-Spend Radical in GOP Clothing,” and posted it on her popular blog.
Coverage by Malkin and other bloggers helped spark online contributions to Hoffman, which soon reached $30,000 per day. It was the day after the Malkin column that Yates Walker found himself on the phone with Hoffman campaign manager Dan Tripp, who was looking for someone to manage their Plattsburgh office. “I hung up and texted him back 15 minutes later,” Walker said, recalling his cell-phone text message: “Just bought my ticket to Syracuse. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

One of the basic principles of representative government is that people have the right to choose their own leaders. If you called for a show of hands at a Tea Party rally . . . well, as I reported Sept. 23 for The American Spectator:

At one point, while a CNN reporter was doing a live interview at the Sept. 12 event, the crowd behind her began to chant “Glenn Beck! Glenn Beck!”
Grassroots conservative enthusiasm notwithstanding, the talk-radio host and Fox News personality is under attack this week, with the liberal establishment’s favorite weapon, a Time magazine cover: “Mad Man: Glenn Beck and the angry style of American politics.” This continues a long tradition of weekly newsmagazine covers demonizing conservative figures like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. . . .
That this is a very familiar sort of smear tactic does not prevent Von Drehle’s clever work from alarming Peter Wehner, a former Bush administration official who bluntly pronounced Beck “Harmful for the Conservative Movement” and proceeded to declare: “Beck seems to be a roiling mix of fear, resentment, and anger — the antithesis of Ronald Reagan.”

Wait? Did you catch that? This quote is from Peter Wehner, the same guy quoted by Pundette at the beginning of this post! And what has been his contribution to this “populist, anti-Washington wave out there”? With Michael Gerson, he co-authored The Sentence That Shall Live in Infamy:

“Herewith, a brief primer . . .”

The thing about a populist wave is that anybody can ride it, even the snobs who sneer at the people who made the tsunami happen. This uprising wasn’t produced by famous people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. When I talk about the people who made it happen, I mean people like Donna Scala of Beaver Falls, Pa., and Kell Gringa of Charlotte, N.C. I mean Rhonda Lee Welsch of New Smyrna Beach, Fla., Jenny Beth Martin of Atlanta, Ga., and Andrea Shea King of Cape Canaveral, Fla.

These are just a few of the Ordinary Americans I’ve met during the course of my travels over the past few months, people whose individual activism helped turn widespread public discontent into an organized movement that even Beltway Establishment elitists like Peter Wehner can no longer ignore. There are hundreds of thousands of you out there, far more numerous — and ultimately far more important — than the Washington insiders who look down their well-connected noses at you.

You have made this movement happen, and I’ve been able to cover the movement because of people like you. It was your contributions to the Shoe Leather Reporting Fund that enabled me to travel to Alabama, Virginia, Kentucky, New York and Florida. Tonight is Christmas Eve. I’m about to go do some last-minute shopping for Mrs. Other McCain and the kids. And beginning tomorrow, I mean to start catching up on my thank-you messages to those of you who have hit the tip jar.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!