Not Dead Yet

DEMOCRATS MAY currently hold a majority in Salem and across
the country—but any Oregonian prone to liberal complacency would
snap out of it after five minutes at the Defending the American Dream
Summit held in the state capital late last week.

“I’m suffering under a very severe handicap,” conservative radio
host Lars Larson told the crowd of 400 mostly retired right-wingers
during opening remarks at the Salem Convention Center on Friday, May
29. “I’m a white male.

“If only my father had had the smarts to marry a Latino woman,”
Larson continued over thunderous applause, referring to recent Supreme
Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. “[As it stands] I know I could never be
a Supreme Court judge.”

Larson broadcast his show on KXL from the lobby of the conference
all day, and his speech followed appearances by Joe “The Plumber”
Wurzelbacher and even Grover Norquist, the principle architect of
former President George W. Bush’s tax cuts who once famously called for
government to be made so small he could “drown it in a bathtub.”

Norquist attacked liberals for pushing “toilets too small to flush
completely” and “cars too small for us to get our families into,”
before describing Republicans who raise taxes as “rat heads in a Coke
bottle,” because “they do long-term damage to the brand.”

The Oregon chapter of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), which ran the
infamous anti-tax teabagging parties in April, organized the
conference. Oregon AFP has been around since September 2007 and now has
13,000 members in 24 chapters across the state. It advertised the
conference with an image of former President Ronald Reagan standing in
front of some rippling stars and stripes. A video played in between the
introductory speakers, juxtaposing images of former Vice President Al
Gore, a polar bear, and the phrases “S.O.S” and “Global Warming
Alarmist” in bright red letters.

Attendees, including the Mercury, paid $35 a ticket for
educational seminars on a variety of “grassroots organizing” topics.
These included: online activism (“people in their pajamas sitting at
home eating Cheetos can have as much power as a reporter from a
newspaper,” said Rachel Alexander from blog intellectualconservative.com);
earned media (“write the title on your media alert how you hope it’s
going to be presented in the newspaper,” said Shelley Tidmore from the
Leadership Institute in Virginia); persuasive debate (“the odds are,
they’re going to lose their cool, and as soon as they do, you’ve won,”
said Oregon AFP Director of Grassroots Development Richard Burke); and
lastly for would-be Bill Sizemores, “using the initiative system in
your town” (“100 years after it was created by progressives as the only
way to change conservative government, it’s the progressives who are
trying to shut down the initiative process in Oregon because they’re
threatened by it,” said attorney Eric Winters).

The Mercury observed two seniors napping in the back of two
separate classes, but for the most part, attendees were switched on and
hungry to acquire new rabble-rousing skills. Adella Robison, who writes
for Resistnet.com, was thrilled to
have both Larson and Wurzelbacher sign the back of her “TEA—Taxed
Enough Already” T-shirt in the same morning.

“I’m a cranberry farmer from the Oregon coast,” Robison told the
Mercury. “I have a lot of liberal friends and I want them to
realize I’m against the socialist agenda. They’re Democrats but they
don’t realize what’s going on. It’s been hijacked.”

Robison’s primary concern was “high taxes” in Oregon, because she
had to borrow to pay hers in April. “I’ve never been political until
six months ago,” she said. “But then I said I’ve got to do something.
They take our money and they give it to these druggies, and I think,
that’s my money.”

AFP Oregon Director Jeff Kropf distributed awards as attendees
digested a low-cholesterol lunch of grilled chicken and angel hair with
pesto. Awards included “Best New Chapter,” which went to Baker City
chapter organizer Kyle Knight, 17. Knight acknowledged, dressed in a
suit and tie with his hair neatly parted, that “we need to do more” to
attract people of his demographic to the conservative movement in
Oregon. Knight was nevertheless proud of drawing 35 attendees to his
chapter’s first meeting recently.

“I’ve been working since I was 14,” he said, when asked what drew
him to the organization. “I’ve been contributing to Social Security,
but I realized I won’t be able to retire as soon as my parents
can.”

At 3 pm, the attendees boarded buses for a rally on the steps of the
capitol building. They may have looked a little old to be “the
inheritors of the sons of liberty,” as FreedomWorks Director Russ
Walker described them earlier, but they sure as hell weren’t going to
give up a scrap of anyone else’s inheritance without a fight.

Three days later, on June 1, Lindsey Roeder, the wife of a man
suspected of fatally shooting an abortion doctor in Kansas over the
weekend, told the Associated Press that his family life began
unraveling when he got involved with anti-government groups.

“The anti-tax stuff came first,” she reportedly said. “And then it
grew and grew.”