Give Us Liberty Read Online Free PDF Page A

the Internet, airwaves, and streets, conventional wisdom was turned on its head and the original Tea Party was seen in a new light.
    For the staff at FreedomWorks, this was nothing new. Originally founded as Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE) in 1984, the organization was dedicated to the idea that ordinary Americans could and should demand more accountability from their elected officials.
    Long before Barack Obama employed community organizing tactics in the Democratic presidential primary states, our organization was mobilizing citizens in the fight for lower taxes, less government, and more freedom. In the 1980s we helped pioneer direct-mail techniques to engage citizens in direct action against big government. In the early 1990s we were one of the first issue advocacy groups to effectively use professional message development and paid television advertising to drive policy outcomes. We used these tools to help stop Vice President Al Gore’s new tax on carbon-based energy, the so-called BTU tax.
    As the years passed, we shifted tactics again to focus on organizing “boots on the ground,” with paid field operatives, putting real people in front of political decision-makers. This proved instrumental in stopping the Clinton administration’s attempted health care takeover. CSE organized protesters at every stop of First Lady Hillary Clinton’s “Health Care Express,” a national bus tour designed to galvanize support for the legislation. Instead of the adoring crowds she expected, Mrs. Clinton was greeted by hundreds of citizens opposed to her plan. We even followed her entourage with a truck towing an old broken-down bus. On the side was spray-painted THIS IS GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE .
    According to Washington Post columnist David Broder, “Nothing better displayed both the muscle and tactical planning of the opponents [of Clinton’s health care plan] than the crushing of this forlorn bus caravan that summer. It was the crowning success of . . . the conservative political interest group, Citizens for a Sound Economy.”
    Today, these tactics seem dated, overpriced, and relatively ineffective—in today’s parlance, “Astroturf”—relative to the real power of the decentralized community of freedom fighters that make up the Tea Party movement. Some things do remain constant, however, like the threats of massive energy taxes on carbon-based fuels and big, expensive, overbearing, government-run health care. Our mission remains the same, too: to defend the individual against the unjust encroachments of big government by empowering Americans to get involved and make a difference when and where decisions are made.
    Years before the emergence of the modern Tea Party movement, FreedomWorks and a few like-minded organizations understood that taxpayer activism was alive and well. We were convinced that good ideas alone were not enough to win and that real social change came from the ground up, not the top down. We were reading Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama’s mentor, a decade before it became cool. We also read Dedication and Leadership by Douglas Hyde and A Force More Powerful by Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall. We understood that it is more important to come out of a legislative or regulatory battle stronger than you went into it than it is to simply win any particular skirmish. In the 1990s we translated this into an internal motto for staff and activists: “Winning by Building; Building by Winning.”
    At the time, however, these tactics were mostly employed by left-leaning groups—teachers’ unions protecting a broken school system, radicals smashing windows at a World Trade Organization protest in Seattle, or public employees pushing for more wages and benefits and fewer hours worked. It seemed then that direct action, as leftists refer to it, was only used in efforts to expand the size and scope of government. The folks at FreedomWorks knew better.
    It