Tea Parties and Frogs

Do we all remember when NBC's Chris Matthews, while reporting on the Obama campaign last year, confessed to getting a thrill up his leg? The tingling sensation was caused by his awe of Barack Obama. This morning, reading the reports about yesterday’s tea party march in Washington, I experienced a similar thrill.

I wondered: Is it finally happening? Are we witnessing, after a hundred years of eroding freedom, the citizens finally rising up and threatening to take back their country? There’s a tendency, when watching a march on Washington, to think it means more than it does. But allow me my own “tingling of the leg” moment, however brief.

To understand why the election of Obama was such a good thing for America, you have merely to consider the frog-and-the-hot-water experiment. You can try this at home, if you have a pot, and a stove, and two frogs. As most of us do. Boil a large pot of water. Drop in a frog. The frog will sense the boiling water and immediately jump out, more or less unharmed. Now take a pot of cold water. Put a frog into it. The frog will happily stay there. Put the pot on the stove and start heating it up. The frog never quite becomes alarmed sufficiently to jump out. Eventually the frog boils to death, because the change was too gradual to trigger the “I gotta jump outta here” reflex. (You can actually do all this with one frog, you don’t need two, if you keep the sequence straight.)

Because our economic freedoms in America have been on a logarithmic curve downwards since approximately the beginning of the 20th century (with especially rapid declines in the Hoovervelt era), we’ve been conducting our own national “frog in the water” experiment. If today’s out-of-control government were introduced as a proposition back in, say, the 1920’s, the citizens would have jumped instantly out of the water, rejecting it utterly. Instead, we’ve been getting glassy eyed and lethargic while being slowly boiled alive.

If John McCain had won the election, this slow-boil would have continued. He would have acquiesced to increasing government control of our lives, because centrists (like George Bush the 1st and John McCain) don’t have a strong enough belief system to take a stand against it—as Reagan did. Barack Obama is far left of center, but campaigned as a centrist. John McCain is an extreme centrist, but campaigned as a conservative. Interesting how, during the campaign, both candidates moved half-a-spectrum to the right. But McCain lost and Obama won. Now safely in the White House, and with full Democratic control of Congress, Obama has reverted to type. In the first six months, his administration (with cooperation from Congress) added more to the U.S. deficit than all previous presidents combined in our nation’s history. No mean feat, but you can achieve it by doing things like nationalizing General Motors and Chrysler, and spending 3/4th of a trillion dollars we don’t have so as to rescue an economy that—we are told—was guilty of spending money it didn't have.

So as I understand it, when private citizens spend beyond their means, it’s bad for an economy. When government spends beyond its means, that’s good for an economy. When a family realizes it doesn’t have the money for a new car, and thus delays the purchase, that’s responsible. When a family throws caution to the winds and spends what they don’t have, that’s irresponsible. When the government takes taxpayer money to bribe the family into foolishly buying the new car it can’t afford, that’s wildly irresponsible. No wait, I got it wrong. That’s a stimulus plan to get the country working again, and is actually very clever of the government. Especially a government that owns two car companies. Am I the only one confused here?

Anyway, the Obama administration followed up the “let’s use taxpayer money to bribe Americans into behaving irresponsibly during tough financial times” car plan with Cap and Trade legislation which—if passed by the Senate—will represent the biggest tax increase in American history. And that’s before we even get to the tax increases themselves that the administration wants.

Finally—one can hope a bridge too far—is the now famous health care reform plan, which apparently also tops out at just under a trillion dollars of new spending. Unless of course it turns out to be more expensive than originally estimated, but when has that ever happened with a government entitlement program? Obama says this health plan “won’t add a dime to the deficit.” But that’s only because he plans to raise another trillion dollars in higher taxes on Americans, to pay for it. So, if you tax the public another trillion dollars, and pay a trillion for health care, it’s…deficit neutral! Oh, OK. Well thank goodness it’s deficit neutral. I was worried it was going to actually cost money.

It wasn’t any one of these things on its own. It was the speed at which President Obama has been trying to re-make America in his own image that finally triggered the “I’ve gotta jump outta here” reflex on display at the tea parties yesterday. Americans, for the first time in my memory, are waking up to the government takeover of their lives. The frog finally figured out that the water’s getting warmer. In fact, it’s getting hot. So two million people marched on Washington. I’m old enough to remember civil rights marches in the sixties, and of anti-Vietnam marches in the seventies. I can’t remember ever seeing a march where people were protesting out-of-control government spending, and loss of liberty. Such things usually don’t get people riled up.

And this is Obama’s gift to us: Rather than allowing the water to warm up year by year, as John McCain would have done, Obama grabbed the stove-top control and turned it to full flame. The frog jumped out of the pot, and—yesterday—landed angrily on the steps of Capitol Hill. The hand-made signs said it all:



Change our Leaders, Not Our Light Bulbs.

Obama Lied, Freedom Died.

Go Green: Recycle Congress

The answer to 1984 is 1776

Stop the Senseless Spending

Save Granny: Defeat ObamaCare

And my personal favorite:
I don’t belong to the party of “No.” I’m with the party of “Hell No”.

Movements have a way of expanding. They fan themselves, like the fire in a wood stove pulling in oxygen, and burning more fiercely. People who shared a vague, undefined concern over the growth of government are realizing that others feel the same way, and that their feelings are not vague at all, but part of a vast movement. This energizes the base. If the mid-term elections were held this November, the party-in-power, the Democrats, would be in trouble. A year from November the backlash may be much worse. As one blogger commented, comparing the crowds who attended the Obama inaugural with the tea party crowds yesterday: “Two million people showed up for the inaugural. Yesterday two million voters showed up.”

What perhaps those living outside the U.S. don’t appreciate is the fear factor that has awoken in America. This goes beyond the health care debate or the normal back-and-forth of politics. You might like or dislike Bill Clinton. You might like or dislike (or despise) George W. Bush. But—as columnist Peggy Noonan put it so eloquently—“Obama terrifies us.”

Politicians anger us. They don’t terrify us. Now one has.

The frog is awake, scared, terrified even, as it realizes its peril. Whatever happens next, the frog is not going to stay in the pot. To mix metaphors deliciously: it’s heading for the polling booth. For that I can only say: Thank you, President Obama. Thank you for waking us up from our hundred-year hypnotic stupor. Thank you for organizing us and for energizing us. Thank you for making us realize we’ve been asleep while a silent thief has been siphoning off our economic freedoms, one cash-for-clunkers program at a time, one ethanol-mandate at a time, one bridge-to-nowhere at a time, and now one industry-takeover at a time. Thank you for terrifying us. Someone needed to.

And thank you for letting me experience what Chris Matthews did a year ago—a subtle thrill over what’s now happening in America.