opinion

24 hours with the Michigan tea party

MT. PLEASANT – It's a bitterly cold Friday evening in early January, and all across the Great Lakes State, ordinary Michiganders are picking up takeout, shrugging off work clothes, boiling water for hot chocolate or cracking beers.

Me? I'm staring into a restroom mirror at the Soaring Eagle Casino Resort, girding for my initial foray into the state's largest annual gathering of tea party patriots.

Sorting through my repertoire of facial expressions for one that conveys friendliness and credulity, I adjust the lanyard bearing my official Michigan Grassroots PowWow name badge and review the code of conduct I have promised myself to uphold for the next 24 hours:

I am here to listen.

I will not argue.

I will not judge.

I will look for common ground.

Then, after an anxious final appraisal — "Do you think this sweater makes me look too liberal?" — I head for the main ballroom.

About 400 people have registered to attend this year's PowWow, which is being billed as Michigan's "premier conservative networking event. Perhaps a quarter of those already milling about the Black River Ballroom, where about two dozen of the Sponsors Whose Generosity Has Helped Keep Your Registration Fee Reasonable are setting up exhibition booths.

This year's PowWow exhibitors include the Patriot Voice Radio Network, Stop Common Core, the County Sovereignty Project, Rick Santorum's Patriot Voices, Dave Agema's Top Gun Conservatives, the John Birch Society, the National Rifle Association, and a motorcycle group called Sons of Liberty Riders ("Bikes are optional, but liberty is required"). On the table nearest the entrance, a large sign urges attendees to "Vote biblically!"

I find Paul Driscoll setting out petitions for the Convention of States Project, a national grassroots effort to call a constitutional convention for the purpose of reining in all three branches of federal government.

Among other things, Driscoll's organization would like to establish term limits for members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, allow Congress to override unpopular Supreme Court rulings by a three-fifths vote and cap the federal income tax rate at 15%.

Driscoll is the Convention of States Project's Michigan coordinator. He hands me a petition listing 11 proposed amendments and directs my attention to the last item, which would mandate that "all federal employees and elected officials shall live under the same laws enacted upon the American citizens."

"I added that one myself," he says.

A little after 6 p.m., Cindy Gamrat and Todd Courser, two of three self-identifying tea party conservatives elected to the state House last November, welcome the 100 or so of us who have filtered into the ballroom for what they assure us will be the biggest Grassroots PowWow ever.

"For me, this is like a family reunion," says Gamrat, a warm, petite blonde woman whose PowWow bio says that she married her high school sweetheart, Joe, and spent much of her adult life as a registered nurse before founding the Plainwell Patriots five years ago.

Courser, a Lapeer lawyer whose close-cropped hair, neatly trimmed beard and steel-rimmed glasses give him a more severe look, echoes Gamrat's welcome, but reminds those in attendance that the theme of this year's PowWow is "Going on Offense."

"We're not just here for a social club," he says.

Gamrat looks across a sea of white faces and asks those in the room, most of whom appear to be in their 50s and 60s, how many plan to attend next month's state Republican Party convention as precinct delegates. About a third raise their hands.

"And how many of you became involved in politics for the first time about four or five years ago?" she asks.

Nearly every hand in the room goes up.

The PowWow's lead-off speaker is Dave Agema, a former state legislator who is under intense pressure from mainstream Republicans to resign his current post as one of Michigan's two Republican National Committee members.

Agema has been criticized for public remarks and social media posts denigrating homosexuals, blacks and Muslims, among other groups. Most recently, he has been criticized for posting an article from a white supremacist newsletter arguing that black people are innately inferior to whites.

Agema's prominent role in the PowWow is the reason several prominent Republican officeholders and conservative groups, including the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, have decided to steer clear of this year's meeting in Mt. Pleasant.

But his appearance on the PowWow podium elicits the first of several standing ovations that he will get this weekend, and he wastes little time in attacking the "political correctness" gripping his party, which he finds "nauseating."

"If you're tea party, if you're ex-military, if you're a gun owner, you're a terrorist now," he says. "Well, I'm all three."

Over the next half hour, Agema takes on illegal immigrants ("97% are in construction"), homosexuals ("You will have more psychological problems, and you will die young") and the federal judiciary ("which is relying on foreign law to decide cases in American courts").

He wraps up his diatribe by urging PowWow attendees to run for public office.

"People tell me: 'But I'm not smart enough to run for state rep,' " Agema says. But he spent three terms in the House, and he's sure the least of those gathered in Mt. Pleasant can run circles around most of his former colleagues.

There was the time, for instance, when Agema asked an unnamed legislator from Detroit to support legislation cutting state expenditures for entitlements.

"His exact words to me were: 'But my people needs those entitlements,' " Agema recalls. He pauses, letting the grammatical error hang in the air. "His exact words."

The evening's keynote speaker is John Yob, a Grand Rapids political consultant who is currently the national political director for U.S. Sen. Rand Paul's political action committee. Paul, a Kentucky Republican who is considered a likely candidate for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, is vying with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and surgeon Ben Carson, among others, for the allegiance of Michigan's tea party faithful.

In most any other room, Yob would easily qualify as the most conservative Republican present. He ran the campaign in which Agema defeated GOP moderate Saul Anuzis for a seat on the RNC, and he choreographed primary victories for high-profile tea party insurgents, such as Delaware's Christine O'Donnell and Nevada's Sharron Angle.

But Yob's roles in Sen. John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign and Rick Snyder's first campaign for governor make some in this audience skeptical about his tea party bona fides.

So he opens by reminding his audience that he cut his teeth by helping a west Michigan conservative named John Smetenka beat Oakland lawyer Scott Romney, then-Gov. John Engler's choice for attorney general, at the 1998 Republican convention.

"The reason I'm in politics is to break power structures," Yob says, "and I've done as much to defeat the Washington and Lansing power structures as anyone in Michigan."

Yob says his own success championing tea party candidates "proves you don't have to be a moderate to be electable." He thinks a proliferation of moderate presidential hopefuls have increased the odds that a tea party candidate will prevail at the GOP's 2016 convention.

"The people in this room should be delighted every time another moderate Republican says he's going to run," Yob declares, "because it's carving up the establishment vote."

Time for some comic relief, in the person of Roman Genn, a young, Russian-born illustrator whose unflattering caricatures of American liberals began appearing on the cover of the right-wing National Review not long after he left Moscow for the United States in 1991.

"I was supposed to come here and talk to you about how evil and stupid Russians are," Genn begins. He says he considered revising his remarks after the massacre of his fellow artists at the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, "but I've decided that if I change the subject of my talk, the terrorists win."

Most of the Mt. Pleasant audience seems unfamiliar with Genn or his work. But they are charmed by his Boris Badenov accent and his contempt for the Soviet empire he fled.

The collapse of the Soviet empire is instructive for those seeking to overthrow Washington's liberal establishment, Genn says, because in the end, it was the Soviet regime's own exhaustion that did it in.

"That was what killed the dinosaur," he says. "The (Russian) security aparatus simply didn't have the bloodlust to continue it. They got too soft-bodied. They could not deal with this new liberty movement."

Friday evening's session has begun to wind down. As a young man asks delegates to the Republican state convention to support him in his bid to be the party's vice chairman for youth, I turn to a 60-something couple sharing my table.

Shirley Amos tells me she and her husband, Jerry, live about four hours southwest, in Kalamazoo County, where he worked as a facilities manager before he was laid off in 2011. They made their first foray into local politics the next summer. He won a seat on the Comstock Township Board of Trustees. She prevailed in a write-in contest for a school board seat that had drawn no registered candidates.

Shirley describes herself as a lifelong conservative, but, like most of those attending the PowWow, she traces her political activism to the election of President Barack Obama.

"But Obama wasn't the first Democratic president elected in your lifetime," I tell Shirley. "What made his election so much more alarming than, say, Bill Clinton's?"

"Bill Clinton is a scumbag," Shirley answers, "but you can tell he really does love America. And this guy doesn't. You can just tell."

"How can you tell that?"

"Well, for one thing, he's not pro-life," she says. "And I don't think you can not be pro-life and really love America."

"Bill Clinton's not pro-life," I point out.

"I know," Shirley says.

It's a minute past 7:30 when I walk into the main ballroom Saturday morning. About two dozen people have gathered for an optional worship service that mingles Christian hymns with patriotic songs like "America, the Beautiful" and "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."

Gina Johnson, a slight woman with a beatific smile and a simple but striking salt-and-pepper haircut, is standing under a banner advertising the Patriot Voices Radio Network and asks for divine guidance in the PowWow's Saturday agenda.

"You are in charge, Lord, so we submit our state to you," she says. "Have your way with us."

As attendees begin to fill the room, Steven Sharpe hustles from table to table, setting each place with leaflets from the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. He is the director of the group's Michigan chapter.

I glance at my copy and notice that the leaflet ("10 Reasons Why Marijuana Prohibition for Adults is Un-American!") seems to have been tailored for a tea party audience already sensitized to the peril of government overreach:

"1. Marijuana prohibition is an infringement of the 10th Amendment," the leaflet asserts.

"2. Firearms are being confiscated from otherwise law-abiding cannabis consumers."

I slip out for another cup of coffee and find Sharpe manning the exhibitor's booth that NORML has erected in the hall outside the ballroom. I ask whether he's found tea party conservatives sympathetic to the cause of decriminalizing pot.

"Some are skeptical at first, because they think marijuana is just about getting high," he says. "But they tend to come around when I educate them about industrial hemp."

Sharpe is pretty passionate about industrial hemp, which can be woven into shoes, brewed to make beer and processed into an array of construction materials.

"You can build houses out of the stuff," he says, handing me a light-weight brick he carries in his brief case for demonstration purposes. In an eye-blink, the same briefcase has disgorged a hemp shoe, hemp soap and a bottle of hemp beer.

"This is a trillion-dollar industry waiting to happen, and right now we're importing it all from Canada," Sharpe says. "We're tired of importing things from Canada."

Greg Cummings is a Gulf War veteran who co-founded the Iowa Grassroots Coalition and now travels around the country as a "national support team member" for the Tea Party Patriots, a loose-knit umbrella organization. He wears a camouflage-print safari hat of the style favored by fellow tea party celebrity Ted Nugent.

Cummings' task is to persuade the PowWow audience, which has swelled this Saturday morning to fill most tables in the ballroom, that they and the candidates they've elected are changing the face of politics in America.

This is difficult to document because there is no universally accepted definition of who the tea party is, and even candidates who self-identify as tea party conservatives typically win elective office as Republican nominees.

Cummings is wary of identifying too closely with the GOP, which he notes continues to be dominated by establishment Republicans.

"Are we fighting a two-front war?" he asks the crowd.

"Yes!" they respond.

Yet Cummings sees Republican gains in gubernatorial and legislative elections as an unambiguous barometer of grassroots conservatives' growing influence. He throws up slides showing the dramatic growth of so-called trifecta states, in which Republicans control the governor's mansion and both legislative houses. Before 2010, he notes, Republicans held sway in just eight trifecta states. Five years later, they control 24 (including Michigan) compared to the Democrats' 12.

"That's not because of the Republican Party," Cummings asserts. "It's because all the tea party people got off the couch!"

Like many people at the PowWow, William (Jerry) Boykin, Saturday's keynote speaker, defies easy description.

A heavily decorated officer whose 37-year-military career included a stint as commander of the U.S. Army's storied Delta Force, he has also been an undersecretary of defense (under George W. Bush), an ordained minister and the executive vice president of the Family Research Council.

Boykin has spent much of the last decade telling audiences like this one that Christians are locked in a holy war with Islam. He bristles at "revisionist historians" who dismiss America's founding fathers as "theists," insisting they prayed to the same God he and other Christian fundamentalists worship.

"I know of nothing indicating that any of them were Muslims," he says.

Muslims, it turns out, are something of an obsession with Boykin, who circles back to them again and again in a folksy half-hour ramble punctuated by frequent references to "stealth jihad" and the threat Sharia law poses to American jurisprudence.

"Most of the Muslims in Dearborn don't want Sharia law. They don't want jihad," Boykin says. "But the only ones that have a voice want jihad."

Boykin, whose distinguished military career ended on a sour note when the Army reprimanded him for making public remarks disparaging Islam and publishing an unapproved memoir in which he was accused of disclosing classified information, says that allegations of religious bigotry leveled against him and other Christian fundamentalists are overblown.

"I don't hate Muslims," he says. "I actually want to help them by bringing the light, the gospel of Jesus Christ to them."

Somebody in the audience alerts Boykin that Patriot Voices is broadcasting his remarks live.

"Wait a minute ... did what I just said go out over the radio?" he says with mock alarm. He turns to face the Patriot Voices sound booth and brings the microphone closer to his mouth and stares.

"My name," Boykin says solemnly, " is ... Dave Agema!"

Hours pass. There are more speeches, more calls to action and a legislative panel in which Gamrat, Courser and Rep. Gary Glenn, R-Midland, discuss strategy for advancing their "contract for liberty," which includes legislation to ban unjust taxation, abolish "regulatory tyranny," and return the responsibility for electing Michigan's U.S. senators to the state Legislature.

The audience is enthusiastic, but skeptical that the tea party legislators will wield sufficient clout to advance their agenda. A man named Kyle asks whether those gathered in the ballroom are just talking to themselves.

"Where will the votes come from for guns, for worship, for real action on pro-life issues?" he asks.

Courser nods sympathetically.

"God's going to have to do some amazing things," he says, "to save the country."

So what have I learned? And why does this amorphous thing known as the tea party still merit my attention (or yours) as we begin a new year?

At the national level, its influence is waning. Tea party candidates like Christine O'Donnell of Delaware and Sharron Angle of Nevada, both of whom upset establishment Republicans in their states' U.S. Senate primaries, have been rebuffed by general election voters.

In the Republican-controlled U.S. House, a tea party threat to unseat incumbent Speaker John Boehner of Ohio fizzled earlier this month after 11 anti-Boehner conservatives (including Michigan Rep. Justin Amash) split their votes among three challengers.

In Michigan, however, tea party candidates like Gamrat, Courser and Glenn and have enjoyed greater success at parlaying GOP primary upsets into general-election victories.

The day after the most recent election, moderate Republican Rep. Al Pscholka of Stevensville conceded a close election for House speaker after all three newly elected tea party candidates came out for his more conservative rival, Rep. Kevin Cotter of Mt. Pleasant.

So tea party voters remain a force to be reckoned with, in Lansing and at least a couple of dozen Republican legislative districts.

I'm sympathetic to many of the tea party's grievances. Like everyone I've spoken to at the PowWow, I feel profoundly alienated from a political process in which successful candidates in both parties serve at the pleasure of lobbyists and undisclosed mega-donors.

It's the remedies tea party conservatives embrace that make me nervous. I still don't understand how the liberty whose loss they feel so acutely would be enhanced by denying so many outside the devout Christian elect a place at the American table.

"American politics has always been an arena for angry minds," historian Richard Hofstadter wrote half a century ago, and that anger still burns bright in many Michigan homes.

The only thing more dangerous than indulging it is pretending it will eventually go away by itself.

Contact Brian Dickerson at 313-222-6584 or bdickerson@freepress.com.