On a beautiful summer evening at a gorgeous home overlooking Lake Barcroft in eastern Fairfax County, not far from where Virginia Sen. Jim Webb lives, four dozen or so suburbanites showed up for a TEA (Taxed Enough Already) Party. They were uniformly polite, well-dressed, and well-spoken.
They were also hoppin’ mad.
“People are fed up with representatives who do not represent us,” Julie Vaughn, a freelance writer and editor who lives in Herndon, angrily told me. “I just feel like the country is falling apart.”
Sevil Kalayci, who lives in Vienna, echoed Vaughn’s sentiments. “We are worried sick about our country,” the retired Loudoun County elementary school teacher added, noting that she lost her part-time job at Macy’s and is terrified she will not be able to make ends meet.
Both women say they were never active in politics before. But one thing so infuriated them that they decided to join thousands of other angry Americans who have attended Taxed Enough Already parties all across the nation: the pork-laden, 1,588-page, $787 billion “emergency” stimulus bill Congress passed on February 13 that was supposed to save American jobs. We all know how that worked out.
“No one in Congress read one word of that spending bill,” Kalayci sputtered. “We melted the phones during the bailout in October and our representatives completely ignored us,” Vaughn chimed in. “When they didn’t even read the stimulus bill, we knew their votes were for sale.”
A month later, at the urging of Fox News talk show host Glen Beck – who initiated the 9/12 Project to organize ordinary Americans concerned about the unprecedented power grab going on in Washington – Vaughn and her husband Ken, an engineer, used the social networking MeetUp site to advertise a local 9/12 meeting at their home on March 13. To their surprise, 40 people showed up.
“I only knew five of them,” Ken said.
“For all I knew, we could have been going to a murderer’s house,” Kalayci added.
Encouraged by the turnout, the Vaughns launched a website (www.nova912.org) and just four months later their group, Northern Virginia 9/12, is already up to about 200 members. Ken estimates that only half are Republicans. The rest are independents like Kalayci and his wife, or Democrats who find themselves aghast at what’s going on.
They’re nobody’s fools. “I’ve worked with government contractors for 20 years,” Julie Vaughn told me. “I’ve seen the government bureaucracy and procurement process. Why would we want to do that with our health care?” Other TEA Party participants were equally dismissive of the cap-and-trade bill passed by the House and now pending in the Senate. “We all know it’s a scam,” one told me.
Whether the deep-seated fury felt by voters who feel betrayed by both major political parties translates into a national electoral uprising remains to be seen. But their anger is palpable, especially among those who admit they tended to ignore politics before. The grassroots have awakened, and they’re not in a very good mood. And when they start organizing independents in a Democratic stronghold like Fairfax County, past political assumptions are no longer relevant.
TEA Partiers across the nation even have their own anthem, a bastardized version of “American Pie”:
“‘Til then we’ll be singing:
Bye-bye, our kid’s piece of the pie.
Obama drives us to the brink,
Leaving us all high and dry.
Coburn and his boys trying all they could think,
Singing: “You’re making our economy die.
You’ve taken our kid’s piece of the pie.”
There’s nothing more likely to spark a full-scale taxpayers’ revolt than taking their kids’ and grandkids’ piece of the American pie.
Barbara F. Hollingworth is The Examiner’s local opinion editor.
