After the Tea Parties By Quin Hillyer

A major problem facing true conservatives is not only that of reducing the influence of the RINOs who have led us down the path to defeat, but whether or not the Republican Party will ever stand for the principles and values that made this country the greatest in the world. Moving the party to embrace the policies of the Reagan years seems almost hopeless, but the record of third parties is not one laced with success either. Perhaps Quin Hillyer in the article below has the answer:

After the Tea Parties

By Quin Hillyer June, 2009 American Spectator (Excerpt)

"What do conservatives do after the Tea Parties? What do you do when the protests are over? How do you harness all that energy? How do you turn it into a permanent force?

When hundreds of thousands of people— by some counts, well over a half million—protested nationwide against big-government-gone-wild on April 15, the near-spontaneous passion of the “Tea Party” demonstrators gave a major boost to the spirits of more seasoned conservative activists. And even bigger, more organized Tea Parties are reportedly on tap for July 4. But it’s one thing to get people to voice their frustrations; it’s a much more difficult thing to channel those frustrations into something long-lastingly positive.

The good news is that even before anybody dreamed of the Tea Parties, a number of conservative grassroots organizations, almost completely divorced from Washington/New York direction, were mobilizing in the far-flung towns and cyberspace wikis of this great nation. Candidate recruitment and training, media and Internet entrepreneurial efforts, intellectual stimulation and policy innovation, all are getting jolts of energy and talent from new organizations. Even better, many of those organizations were well positioned to build directly on the Tea Party momentum while working to create the next generation of conservative political infrastructure. Indeed, one such organization, American Majority, almost immediately posted a new website called, yes, AfterTheTeaParty.com. “Run for local office,” says one sub-link at the site. “Be an activist,” says another. “Support Freedom!” says a third. American Majority’s main objective is to recruit and train candidates for local and state offices such as town councils, school boards, county commissions, and state legislators—or, if people just don’t want to run for office, to at least train them to be effective activists. “You have to move from protesting to becoming ‘implementers,’” said American Majority President Ned Ryun. “We are saying to people: We will empower you. If you want to be involved, we will give you the tools.”

Ryun continued: “We’re trying to stay very much on the cutting edge, to teach things like: How do you use Twitter, how do you use Facebook, Plurk, and Ning? How do you use social networking tools in campaigns or in building coalitions or in building communities of like-minded citizens? We’re really trying to stay on the cutting edge—and trying to professionalize as much as possible.”

OTHER ORGANIZATIONS, OF COURSE, offer candidate training among their options—including the venerable Leadership Institute, which in its training of potential candidates, campaign managers, youth leaders, student journalists, campus organizers, and others remains one of conservatism’s greatest resources.

But what American Majority does is to focus specifically at the grassroots, at the local level—and locates full-time staff in those local areas to build relationships, actively search for political talent, and convince activists that they may have a calling in local public office. In short, rather than waiting for potential leaders to self-select, American Majority goes out into the local communities and finds those leaders—and then teaches them not only how to run and win campaigns, but how to navigate the politics and policies of their new offices after they win.

“We’re trying to create that broad deep bench of future leaders who have a good perspective on the proper role of government and then give them the tools to implement those policy ideas,” Ryun said. To do that, American Majority unofficially partners with state-level conservative think tanks to create site-specific manuals about how to serve in office—what the jobs entail, what policies are at issue, how the system works. And its local staff stays in touch after their training sessions and serves as a sounding board and knowledge resource, as well as providing continued encouragement and “moral support.”

American Majority has chapters in six states so far—Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Minnesota, Arkansas, and Texas—and expects to expand into two or three more by year’s end. On April 7, its training was put to the test in both Oklahoma and Kansas, with city council races in the former and school board and city council races in Kansas. In Kansas, candidates it trained won 23 of 54 races, and in Oklahoma the record was even better: 17 of 27. Of those 17, 16 were first-time candidates.

“What the American Majority people helped me to do was to define how I can give back by showing me that my unique perspective will matter and does matter,” said one of those winning candidates, new school board member Todd Biggs of Pittsburg, Kansas. “The American Majority let me know that I wasn’t alone and that my opinion counts.”

Not only that, he said, but when he faced a last-minute choice about whether to run for the four-year term he had intended, or to switch and run for an open two-year term against “a big-wig from the local university,” as he called him, it was to American Majority’s local chief, Dennis Wilson, that he turned for unofficial advice. Biggs ran for the two-year term, and endured his opponent bragging at a key public forum about how many people the opponent could call in Washington to get things done for the local schools.

Biggs, who runs a landscaping business and “gets [his] hands dirty every day,” said his American Majority training helped him keep his wits when he would otherwise have felt outclassed. “Folks,” he told the audience, “I can’t call a single person in Washington, D.C., for you, but the people of Pittsburg, Kansas, have my phone number and when you call, I’ll listen, and that’s what’s really important here.” Biggs won with 55 percent of the vote.

AMERICAN MAJORITY'S PRESIDENT, Ned Ryun, and his identical twin Drew, age 36, are both longtime conservative activists. Drew just left a top job at the conservative American Center for Law and Justice to return to oversee the American Majority efforts in Oklahoma and Texas; Ned was a co-founder of the Generation Joshua program that provides character- and civic-education for youths aged 11-19. (The Ryuns are sons of former international track world-record holder and later five-term U.S. Rep. Jim Ryun.) Their American Majority originally was conceived (but is organizationally independent from) the Sam Adams Alliance, which is another key, fairly new player on the grassroots conservative scene. Sam Adams, founded in December 2006, is particularly focused on training people how to use new media tools, especially “wikis” (as in Wikipedia), and using them as tools to “advance economic and individual liberty.”

“Our political system is dysfunctional,” said Eric O’Keefe, chairman of the Chicago-based Sam Adams Alliance. “Congress is unrepresentative; government is out of control and the political parties are part of the system, both of them. So I am working on supporting independent infrastructure so that citizens can be heard and be effective and support mission- based, principled organizations.”" American Spectator