Every successful revolutionary movement starts with an act of defiance – as ordinary people stand up against the tyrants who are ruling them. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 is an iconic example, as colonists dumped a shipload of tea into the harbor rather than acknowledge the right of the British Parliament to tax it. The tea party, of course, helped spark the American Revolution as its message of “no taxation without representation” gave voice to deeply held resentments throughout the American colonies.

The media have made much ado about the political Tea parties, started in 2009, that have had some level of success in protesting the government expansions under the Obama administration. Unfortunately, that movement – for all its many good points and despite the clarity of its Taxed Enough Already moniker – represents a mish-mash of ideas and has been plagued by factional disputes. The most successful mini-revolutions take place when the People are unified around a simple and clearly understood theme.

One of the best recent representations of that old defiant spirit can be found in the past couple of weeks in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, a poor mostly Latino city of about 37,000, where about 2,000 city residents showed up and forced the resignation of worthless city officials after they learned about the way they had enriched themselves at the expense of city taxpayers. As one Bell resident said after a council member gave a self-serving justification of her $100,000 part-time salary (council members typically earn about $8,000 a year): “You were a crook yesterday, you’re a crook today, and you’ll be a crook tomorrow.”

That’s a simple idea most of us can rally around! The crooks are ripping us off.

The Bell situation garnered national attention because of the level of plundering. A city manager, Robert Rizzo, earned $787,000 a year from the impoverished burb – a place that has been cutting services and where 10 percent of the budget went to Rizzo, Police Chief Randy Adams ($457,000) and Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia ($357,000).

Rizzo – who lives in fancy digs in Huntington Beach and has a horse farm in Washington state – boasted that he could have easily earned as much in the private sector, which is a load of nonsense and something that all city managers claim. Yet these managers, who typically make nearly $300,000 a year in California, manage basic city tasks in a bureaucratic monopoly environment. They do not run the equivalent of private, competitive firms.

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We Bostonians fancy ourselves a sophisticated, intelligent type of folk, even if it manifests itself in a quirky local vernacular, foul-mouthed self-righteousness and a self-absorbed elitism built upon the glory days of 1775, back when we ruled the school.

New Englanders, for example, boast t-shirts and bumper stickers which tell us that the “Yankees suck” — despite the 27 World Series rings for the Bronx Bombers and the seven for the Red Sox that would seem to indicate that we, in fact, are the ones who suck.

We also call Boston The Hub, as in the Hub of the Universe. That’s right. Our tiny little city’s got megalomania issues … which probably explains why 90 percent of  diversity-loving voters in Brookline and Cambridge pulled a lever for Obama in November 2008. No Bostonian worth his chowder, by the way, has ever called the city Beantown.

The intellectual elitism is so profound here that the average plumber in Boston — and I come from a long, proud line of Local 12 guys — thinks that he’s wicked smaht, smahtah even than a brain surgeon from Alabama. It’s just the way we’re raised — snobbish old blue-blood Brahminism adopted by everyone from Boston’s nouveau riche to the old Irish-Catholic working class.

So the arrival of Sarah Palin in Boston Wednesday was like a visit by an alien being from the planet of idiots in the eyes of the local so-called intelligentsia.

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Obamacare has become a TEA Party issue, and that’s a good thing for the TEA Partiers, and all freedom-loving Americans.

At the April 15 TEA Party gathering here in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, speakers will include a hopeful candidate for Congress, a pastor, and even a law enforcement official.  What really caught my eye, though, was the announcement beforehand that “a local orthopedic surgeon will address the recently passed health care  legislation.”  This is hardly an isolated incident.

Think about it — the TEA Party is all about protesting massive, out of control government spending, and the excessive taxation that is necessary to support it.  Obamacare has been largely debated as healthcare reform.  Why should TEA Partiers care about healthcare reform?  You may think that the TEA Party is branching out into more areas than the core issue that has made it such a huge and ever-growing success.  You may find this risky and perhaps alarming.  Let me disabuse you of that notion, and assure you that Obamacare was destined to be a core TEA Party issue from the very beginning.

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The struggles of the Democrats and the Republicans are making news.  The Democrats are learning that it is far easier to make campaign promises than it is to govern. As for Republicans, the party that loses the Presidential election often spends the off-year attempting to refine its message if not find a new message and new messengers. In the watchful eye of 24/7 cable news channels and the Internet, however, such political soul searching can appear rather untidy.  As the calendar turns, the process remains unresolved for Republicans to say the least.  Worse than mere overexposure, according to Rasmussen polling, despite Obama’s falling polls and Democrat divisions, the Republican Party would fare worse in an upcoming election than the Tea Party – a “Third Party” that, as of yet, does not exist.  It is no minor issue because with the help of Tea Party activists, Republicans certainly can beat Democrats next year – without them they may not.

It would seem evident to many that the Tea Party movement should be the natural ally of the Republican Party.  After all, the issues that inspire most Tea Party activists should not be inimical to Republican Party leaders.  However, the fact that the Tea Party movement is at odds with certain aspects of the Republican establishment belies the greater issue as to why the Tea Party movement – and its potential to be a 3^rd Party movement – arose at all.

It is worthy, as part of this discussion, to note that the rise and fall of third party movements and candidates is directly tied to whether voters perceive the existing parties as being successful.  In this context, successful means providing effective leadership on the major issues of the day.

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Today, in 1773, members of the Sons of Liberty boarded British ships in Boston and dumped their cargo of tea into the harbor.

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[Ed Note: This is the first post to run at BigGovernment. It was published two-years ago today. It still seems relevant.]

In 1995, President Bill Clinton stood before the nation and proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” The following year, the federal budget deficit stood at 1.4% of GDP. Thirteen years later, in 2008, the deficit had doubled, to just over 3% of GDP. This year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal budget deficit will equal 11.4% of GDP.

As George Will would say, “Well.”

This is the real source of our “summer of discontent.” Yes, millions of Americans spent the month of August holding Tea Parties, attending town halls, organizing, marching and protesting against ObamaCare, i.e. Congressional and Administration proposals to reconstruct the entire health care sector. But to suggest that health care alone is at the root of this backlash is to miss the forest for the trees. To paraphrase Democrat strategist James Carville, “It’s the big government, stupid.”

Since last September when the financial markets stumbled, we’ve seen a Wall Street bailout, government takeovers of AIG, Citigroup, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GM, Chrysler, and numerous banks. The Federal Reserve has opened its discount window to almost all-comers and has taken the unprecedented step of aggressively buying up the federal government’s own debt. Congress rushed through a “stimulus to nowhere,” moved closer to a “cap-and-trade” remake of the energy sector and openly talked about higher taxes and more regulation. (more…)