What really went down in Wisconsin

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 08:28:00 -0400

What happened in Wisconsin Tuesday night was not about an election or a politician. It wasn’t about collective bargaining or budget deficits. It was about something far more important and far more intangible. It was about who and what we are as Americans.

The people of Wisconsin had a choice. Would they, and in turn the rest of America, whose eyes were riveted on this small northern state, be a people with their hand constantly extended to the public trough shouting “give me, give me, give me”? Or, as the Tea Party has tried to exemplify, would we become the people pushing the plough, demanding, “give me liberty,” whatever the cost. It was about Barack Obama’s view of America versus the Tea Party’s. And once again, the Tea Party emerged victorious.

Those of us that came into Wisconsin over these past days and weeks joined with other activists in the state to deliver that view of America.

In the last five days, we reached over 125,000 people through door belling and phone banking efforts.

We talked not about elections, but about facts. We remained loyal to principles and not parties or politicians. It's why when we pointed out that the budget measures were not as great a cost as the anti-reform union bosses would have liked America to believe, people listen.

People, of all political persuasions, saw this to be true especially in light of a world view that includes a decimated Greece and collapsing global economy. And, far from being draconian changes, people in Wisconsin understood that state workers were asked to pay just under six percent of their salaries towards benefits, a little over twelve percent to their premiums. They saw those same employees could still collectively bargain for their wages but not for pensions and benefits, which had nearly bankrupted the state.

The reforms transformed Wisconsin’s $3.6 billion dollar deficit into a $154 million surplus. Nowhere was that felt more powerfully than in Wisconsin’s schools. The Kaukauna School District, near Appleton, Wisconsin, had a $400,000 deficit for the upcoming school year and was going to be forced to lay off teachers. By instituting the changes to pension and health care payments, Kaukauna swung to a $1.5 million surplus allowing class sizes to fall and was able to institute over $300,000 in merit pay for teachers.

Tying this type of fiscal reforms to the cause of liberty is never an easy sell, even for the Tea Party, but it’s a connection that must be made and permanently cemented if we are to continue down a path to prosperity.

Without exception, economic freedom is the basis of all political freedom. One’s freedom is directly tied to how indebted and beholden one is to the government. Throw off the yoke of bureaucratic bondage, and freedom and prosperity flourish. Wisconsin proved this. The unemployment rate is down well below the national average to 6.2%, the lowest it’s been since 2008.

It’s interesting then, to return to the Tea Party’s less than illustrious beginnings in light of the Wisconsin success. When the movement began in 2009, many people wrote it off as a bunch of tri-cornered hat nut jobs with some quaint version of a government beholden to its people and the Constitution. Arnold Schwarzenegger (a 2003 California recall interloper) once said the Tea Party was going nowhere. Former House Speaker, California Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi famously told America the Tea Party wasn’t really grassroots, but “more of an astroturf movement”.

But the left’s unanswered prayers of the Tea Party’s demise were very evident in Wisconsin. President Clinton and Rev. Jessie Jackson came to Wisconsin on separate days and couldn’t muster 2,000 people combined at their events. Meanwhile, the little Racine Tea Party, in Racine County, whose biggest names were Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and Rep. Paul Ryan, turned out a 4,000 plus crowd on the Saturday morning before the recall.

Together, perhaps what went down in Wisconsin on Tuesday took the left by surprise, but it shouldn’t have. Astroturf and the Tea Party share the same characteristic; they both last. And so it seems, does liberty.

Jennifer Stefano is a wife, mother and Tea Party Activist. She is the Pennsylvania state director for Americans for Prosperity and has been in Wisconsin from June 1 through June 6 talking about fiscal reforms. Follow her on Twitter @stefanospeaks.

Media must stop falsely accusing the Tea Party every time tragedy strikes

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 16:08:26 -0400

As Americans rightly turn their initial shock at the Colorado massacre into a search for meaning and remembrance, another story is unfolding. It is not a tragedy nor should it overshadow the horrific events of Friday, but it has long-term consequences nonetheless. The persistent liberal bias by the mainstream media is having damning effect on the lives and political voice of those on the center right.

The bias reared its left leaning head in the hours after news of the Colorado shooting broke. In an effort to assign blame and score a coup, ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos and reporter Brian Ross incorrectly tied the alleged Colorado shooter to the Tea Party. Stephanopoulos called it “significant.”

What was significant was that the journalistic ethos of Stephanopoulos and Ross in reporting this fact barely reached the level of a fourth grader Googling Justin Beiber’s favorite color.

As Stephanopoulos blithely tossed to weather, more enterprising reporters and bloggers quickly proved that ABC News had just linked the wrong man to a deadly event. Mea culpas followed, but the damage was done. The Tea Party was again associated with mass murder.

Dustin Stockton, knew all to well what that means. He was a Tea Party activist living in Arizona at the time of the Gabby Gifford shooting. In the hours and days following the horrific event, everyone from the New York Times to Gifford’s father incorrectly blamed her attack on the Tea Party. The accusations were false but the image still stuck. Stockton and other Tea Partiers were sent threatening e-mails blaming him for that massacre saying, “I would get what was coming to me.”

Stockton is now the chief strategist for TheTeaParty.net and says the hatred toward him for his political views is still virulent. “I’m so tired of getting harassed and getting in arguments and turning people off because of what they think they know about the Tea Party,” said Stockton. “I no longer say I’m with the Tea Party I just say I work in politics.”

The liberal media bias does not begin or end with tying the center right to mass murder. NPR’s former CEO accused the Tea Party of being not just racist and xenophobic but also “islamophobes.” The CEO lost his job for the comments, but they resonated. Those same sentiments have been echoed far and wide in the media with a cursory Google search of “Tea Party Racist” yielding more than three million results.

And it is the racism charges that have been most damning to those of us associated with center-right politics.

The NAACP had a field day in 2009 seizing on the racism charges and issuing “Tea Party Nationalism” reports. The liberal civil rights group even started a website called the teapartytracker.org designed to catch the racist Tea Partiers in the act. Never mind that the webpage is no longer available. The media gave near unchallenged access to the civil rights group to make their claims.

The Tea Party, being a decentralized and, let’s face it, overall poor funded band of Americans, has little ability to counter the attacks. It’s why ABC News' Sam Donaldson could recently declare that the political right really opposes the president because he is black (and not, say, because he’s a tax and spend liberal) and be barely held accountable for it.

The bias against all things center right and particularly the Tea Party stuck and has helped to undercut the political legitimacy of the center-right. Why would anyone listen to a Tea Partier discuss fiscal responsibility when the media says they’re just racists? Why would anyone want to listen to us talk about free markets or economic freedom when they think we are linked to deadly mass shootings?

The racism charges hit black conservatives the worst. Joshua Warren, a former Democrat and member of the First Coast Tea Party, says the Tea Party because the media has been so effective at painting the group as extreme, he has almost become invisible.

“The attacks are so overtop it’s unbelievable,” says Warren, who is African American. “I’ve been spit at and called unspeakable names because of the stands that I take because they’re not the stands the black community is supposed to take. You’re an outcast.”

Carl Boyd Jr., Nashville’s only African American conservative radio host, says the media’s continued biased against the political right have been damning for him. “The Black Democrats say you don’t care about the black. I get really accused in the family. They say I bump my head or lost my mind or sold out. It used to bother me a little bit.”

Lloyd Marcus knows this well. An African American who is a regular on the Tea Party speaking circuit says he too has become a social outcast among friends and neighbors. “The black folks in my neighborhood snub me,” says the chairman of the Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama PAC. “I’ve had messages left by neighbors saying that I should be ashamed of myself for being a Tea Party activist.”

That shame also reigns down on activists’ family members as well, even if those relatives are not part of the political fray. Some people feel if the media is showing Tea Partiers as racist, bigoted monsters, it goes to figure their family must be too.

Which is why I should not have been surprised this week when a neighbor I have never met mocked my crying toddler because he disliked my politics views. Besides being horribly unsettling, it was telling. To that man, I wasn’t a neighborhood mom helping her child with a skinned knee, I was a racist monster and my family and I were going to be treated as such.

Sadly, that story is not unique, nor is it likely to stop any time soon thanks to the recklessness bias shown by ABC News. Stephanopoulos and Ross will probably get off with a wrist slap, but the Tea Party will not. Many of us on the center right will continue to be seen as politically illegitimate and less than human. Perhaps instead of offering lame apologies, Stephanopoulos and Ross can report on the “significance” of that.

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What really went down in Wisconsin

Media must stop falsely accusing the Tea Party every time tragedy strikes