The 17-year-old high school senior waded into a sea of communist red to deliver the truth of liberty in the form the US Constitution to the political pagans assembled.

In the process, Patrick was verbally assaulted by an old man who graphically described sexual tea-bagging to the high school student. The incident took place during dueling protests in Jefferson City, Missouri, and was caught on two separate video cameras.

Patrick had grabbed a stack of Pocket Constitutions and Declarations offered for free by the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition The Tea Party held a rally on the south side of the Missouri Capitol. He took those Constitutions to the north side of the Capitol where the unions and socialists had gathered to denounce Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

The contrast of the two generations–the dying union generation that demanding more of others with the rising Generation Tea–could not be more stark. Or more encouraging.

On the one hand, you have a creepy old man, speaking filth to a boy. On the other, you have Patrick, politely fending off the old pervert’s sexual advances.

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The bizarre and unlikely rebellion known as the Tea Party began with only a few thousand people in a few dozen places on February 27, 2009. Those of us who were there in St. Louis or Atlanta, Chicago, or Los Angeles, feel a bit of trepidation as we approach the November 2 Mid-Term. Will we live up to our promise? Or will we live under the growing tyranny of debt, taxes, regulation, and corruption.

With so much at stake, let us pause one last time.  Like a football team before the championship game, we need a moment to reflect on what we’ve done, to lend strength to our companions, to reinvigorate our determination, and to ask God’s favor.  On September 12, the American conservative movement will clear its throat and prepare to sing to the world.

In Washington, DC, Sacramento, CA, and St. Louis, MO, tens of thousands of Americans will gather one final time before the most important election in a century. We will do what we always do at Tea Parties: pray, speak, listen, sing, and celebrate.  While we may be angry, we are also joyful that our words find so many welcoming ears, and that our voices blend with so many others.

We will gather together as a family, full of the drama and petty disagreements that seemed so important—so life or death—a few weeks ago. They weren’t important, of course. They were frivolous. But human nature makes mountains out of mole hills.  Until fate places a real mountain in the path to our destiny.

That mountain is debt, government, corruption, and depression.  Its malignant foliage is stolen power, plundered treasures, and trampled rights.  And while that mountain looks mighty and strong, we know that Jericho’s walls fell to trumpets and prayers.  We know that faith can move a mountain.

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One of the most popular and most talked about movies of 1993 was Falling Down, starring Michael Douglas, Barbara Hershey, and Robert Duval.

Douglas played William “D-FENS” Foster, an engineer at a defense contractor who has a really bad day.  Some described the movie as “an ordinary man at war with the everyday world.” Foster became an iconic anti-hero, symbolizing the people who (stealing Bill Clinton’s line)worked hard and played by the rules, yet found themselves at the bottom of the heap in the post-Cold War era of 1993.

Foster’s wife (Hershey) has left him.  He’s moved in with his mother. Making matters worse, Hershey’s obtained a court order barring Foster from visiting their young daughter, whom he loves more than life itself.

On the little girl’s birthday, everything falls apart.  Foster gets laid off from the defense contractor job.  The police remind him he’s not to go near his wife or daughter.  And in one memorable scene, a fast food chain’s rules interfere when Foster just wants breakfas:

When I read about Jetblue flight attendant, Steven Slater, Falling Down comes to mind.

And it’s not just me.

According to a new Wall Street Journal/MSNBC Poll, two-thirds of Americans believe the worst is yet to come for the economy.  Democrat pollster Peter Hart sees Steven Slater as metaphor for voter sentiment.

Mr. Hart said the 2010 contest is being pulled by the sentiment associated with the JetBlue flight attendant who fled his plane via the emergency chute after an altercation with a passenger. Calling it the “JetBlue election,” Mr. Hart said: “Everyone’s hurling invective and they’re all taking the emergency exit.”

Like William Foster, Steven Slater seems to symbolize—in exaggerated form—the mood of the American people.  We’re fed up with bureaucracy and petty rules, “minute and uniform,” as Tocqueville put it,  “. . . through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd.”

Steven Slater broke through, alright.

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Between February 27, 2009, and today we learned something.

We learned that this administration is bent on subverting republican government. Article IV of the Constitution — and its guarantee of a republican form of government — means nothing to Obama, the Congressional majority, and Obama’s Supreme Court appointees. Obama rules by decree. Elena Kagan’s okay with banning books.

November 2 is our last chance to stop the free fall into tyranny.

In many states, including my home state of Missouri, passions rage in advance of the August 3 primary. I understand. To a degree, I helped enflame those passions by launching a tea party in February of last year.  But that was before we fully understood what’s going on in Washington—before we realized that Barack Obama and the Congressional Democrats (not to mention Woody Allen and Ed Schultz) believe in tyranny.

On August 3 and November 2, I will follow the advice of the wisest man I every met, William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley’s rule for picking a candidate was simple: “Always support the rightward-most, viable candidate.” I would ask the same of everyone whose advanced the cause of liberty in the past seventeen months or longer.

Some good, sincere people want to tear down candidates they believe are less than ideal.  In some election years, I’m inclined to do the same.  But not this year. Not with what we know.

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The NAACP has apparently decided  to call 20 million American patriots “racists” for advancing liberty and economic opportunity. Their evidence?  Attendance at a Tea Party–anywhere, anytime. Specifically, according to the Kansas City Star (via Jim Hoft):

The resolution, scheduled for a vote as early as Tuesday by delegates attending the annual NAACP convention in Kansas City, calls upon “all people of good will to repudiate the racism of the Tea Parties, and to stand in opposition to its drive to push our country back to the pre-civil rights era.”

At midnight, the St. Louis Tea Party Coalition sent a resolution condemning the NAACP’s false and defamatory statement to the organization’s Washington bureau. We took this action because we will not stand for their lies.

The Tea Party’s principles are simple and clear:

• Smaller federal government
• Lower taxes
• Fiscal responsibility
• National security
• Federalism

Those are precisely the tools to lift all Americans out of poverty. They’ve worked every time they’ve been tried.  In America, we just haven’t tried them in awhile, due in large part to the NAACP’s advancement of socialism.

Each of these First Principles protects the rights of every American—the rights inherent in our humanity, not phony “rights” invented by a bureaucrat.  We stand for rights given by God that no man, no government, can justifiably deny or diminish.  Our principles are the very same principles that the NAACP stood for in 1909 but has wandered away from since the 1970s.

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A Washington Post/ABC News poll shows a major shift in sentiment toward (against?) the tea party movement.

As an original tea party organizer, this shift doesn’t surprise me. By “this shift,” I refer to the the tea party’s popularity waning among Southerners and people aged 18 to 29. The poll shows that a full 50 percent of Americans now have a negative view of the tea party.

Sure, there may have been some chicanery with the questions to skew the results. But only a true shift in sentiment would result in change this big. After a year of wall-to-wall coverage of “tea party,” this downshift should come as no surprise.

I think there are several issues here:

1. Rand Paul’s performance since the primary has been a net negative.  I pointed out on Larry Kudlow’s show on CNBC the day after Kentucky primary that Paul’s candidacy is not a referendum on the tea party movement. Nothing is. But he and some tea partyers insisted on linking the two, and his handling of controversy has been less than spectacular.
2. In Nevada, Michigan, and elsewhere, leftists have created fake “tea party” parties that have damaged the brand by running Democrats pretending to be tea partyers. The idea is to split the center-right vote to allow the like of Harry Reid back into Congress.
3. In-fighting among tea partyers has left a foul taste in the mouths of many. This development shouldn’t be a surprise. The tea party movement has no structure or hierarchy to keep order, and it’s filled with people who are new to this arena. We make mistakes, people.  Get over it.
4. Some disenchanted Republicans who were early tea partyers have returned to the GOP. That doesn’t mean they won’t continue to fight the good fight. It means they’ll do so under a banner they’re more familiar with.
5. Zealots and purists have splintered off and driven away more pragmatic reformers. We’ve seen this in numerous places across the country.  When the zealots lose, they tend to take their balls and go home. They also tend to turn off the people who just want their country back.
6. After a year of hearing “tea party, tea party, tea party,” many people are probably just tired of hearing about it.  I am tired of hearing about it. I want to rack up some damn wins and get about fixing the country, and really don’t care what was call the thing that does it.
7. We’re in The Dip

These shifts in sentiment should come as no surprise. Instead, they indicate that our movement is growing up.  Part of that maturation process involves channeling our energies into outgrowths of the tea party movement.

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If you followed the news out of Nashville, you probably heard that some Tea Party folks are creating a Political Action Committee that will win 15 to 20 key Congressional races in 2010 and, perhaps, in years beyond. What you didn’t hear at the press conference was that several grassroots tea party organizers are so strongly in favor of this move that we have agreed to serve Ensuring Liberty PAC through its organizing parent, the Ensuring Liberty 501.c(4). Our local tea parties will continue unchanged.

Who Comprises the ELPAC

Very simply, ELPAC is led by six people from some of the most effective local Tea Party organizations in America:

• Mark Skoda of The Memphis Tea Party
• Steve McQueen of The Quincy Tea Party
• State Sen. John Loudon (MO-Ret.) of St. Louis Tea Party
• Rose Corona, a California farmer and Patriot
• Brad Ehmen of The Quincy Tea Party
• Bill Hennessy of St. Louis Tea Party

While you might not recognize all of these names, I do. These are the people who have been in the fox holes with us since day one. They are bold and resilient fighters for freedom. They are the men and women we turn to for counsel, support, advice, strength, and help across the Mid-West and across the the nation. We share mutual faith in each other. The men and women on this list have skills to win elections with grassroots activism. They embody what happened in NY-23 and Massachusetts.

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For the Tea Party movement, 2009 was about coming together, meeting our brothers and sisters in arms, and standing athwart socialism, yelling, “Stop!”  It worked. President Obama entered office promising socialized medicine, card check, and cap and trade all before the August recess.  He went 0 for 3 thanks a grassroots uprising that came together like spattered quicksilver.

In our desire to fix things, we also launched a lot of legislative initiatives.  These initiatives included various sovereignty amendments in the states, petitions for Constitutional Conventions, petitions for redress of grievances, petitions of right, and state laws exempting states from any national healthcare legislation.  Each of these was a bold and important step, and such laws, amendments, and petitions should continue.  Next year.

Let’s not fool ourselves. While the Tea Party movement has been very effective, it has been effective only when focused on a very narrow set of compelling causes.  Our quick responses to card check and cap and trade convinced the White House to suspend those initiatives until we weren’t looking. Our overwhelming attack on ObamaCare took the last bit of energy and time from each Tea Party patriot.  We left it all on the field.

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Republican leadership, at all levels, should have learned a quick lesson about the mood of America’s conservatives from the Dede Scozzafava debacle in upper New York state. Unfortunately, the GOP House Leadership might need some remedial instruction. And a group of conservative Republican lawmakers met Tuesday to draft that lesson plan.

Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has been one of the more vocal opponents of ObamaCare. Last week on Sean Hannity’s television program, Ms. Bachmann announced the “House Call on Congress.” She urged Americans to come to Washington, DC, to a press conference on the Capitol steps at Noon on Thursday, November 5.  After the presser, Ms. Bachmann will lead the citizens through House office buildings to confront Democrats on their own turf. She hopes to draw thousands to DC to tell the Democrats to their faces, “We don’t want a government takeover of our healthcare.” Yesterday, Ms. Bachmann announced that conservative talk radio host Mark Levin would join her.

Leaders, though, tend to be cautious.  Before the Hill brass swooped in to “help” organizers by providing speaker lists and talking points, a band of conservatives formed a steering committee to keep the message and the tactics authentically conservative. These rebels don’t want talking points; they want a battle cry.

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The Tea Party movement has been quiet since the September 12 massive rallies in Washington, Quincy, Dallas, and elsewhere.  Paul Krugman was so bold as to write on October 26, “the tea baggers have come and gone.”  On the same day, CBS News blogger Charles Cooper asked rhetorically, “Did the Tea Partiers Party Too Soon?”  The message from the White House talking points memo was clear:  that annoying fit of folksy patriotic crap is over, and we in the political class can get back to the business of tyranny.