Beginnings of a revolt

Angry “tea party” patriots who launched a nationwide grass-roots rebellion against big, intrusive government, punitive taxes and reckless spending are rallying their troops once again.

Their target is President Obama’s government-run health care plan, but this time their ground forces are larger, their goals more ambitious and their potential political impact much greater.

These tea party brigades have been a driving force behind the packed congressional town-hall phenomena that have stunned the Democrats, put the Obama administration on the defensive and sent its health care reform polls into a nose dive.

This is the citizen-led movement that swept the country earlier this year in retaliation to the massive bailout and big spending bills coming out of the Democratic Congress. The seemingly spontaneous turnout at protest rallies throughout the nation has spawned an army of independent, local groups and organizations.

That army is now gearing up to make its voice heard in the battle over the biggest spending bill ever: creation of a new federally run entitlement that will expand the size and cost of government by trillions of dollars and dozens of bureaucracies.

Tea party activists — conservatives, libertarians, independents and just plain ordinary citizens concerned about their country’s direction — have shunned suggestions to merge themselves into larger organizations, preferring to make their impact felt locally.

And they have effectively done that in this month’s town-hall gatherings that have seized the White House’s attention and may, in the end, defeat or significantly modify the health care bills now pending in Congress.

But now a Sacramento, Calif.,-based group known as Our Country Deserves Better is gearing up to connect momentarily some of these disparate groups with an ambitious Tea Party Express caravan that will hold 35 rallies in cities and towns from California to Maine.

It will end with a rally in Washington on Sept. 12 — when Congress is expected to be moving health care legislation through the House and Senate — a date when many tea party groups had planned to gather here anyway. Their focus: health care legislation that they fear will further rob them of their freedoms and cripple the economy.

“In the past, we have focused on the excessive size of government, and now the debate is about the idea that government is becoming too powerful and making decisions it shouldn’t make about people’s personal lives, including health care decisons,” said Joe Wierzbicki, coordinator of the committee that is planning the cross-country road trip that will begin on Aug. 28.

“I think the health care issues symbolize what the great debate in this country is about. And that is the overreaching of government, what is the appropriate role of government, and at what point does excessive government regulations and control interfere with the freedoms and liberties of individuals and their families,” Mr. Wierzbicki told me.

“We are also asking individuals to go out to these town-hall meetings and express their views and mobilize,” he added.

Before August, Our Country Deserves Better, which boasts 350,000 supporters, was entirely focused on the tax-and-spend issues that first sparked their protests.

But their focus broadened as the health care debate heated up and the congressional town-hall meetings suddenly became the new front in the battle against Mr. Obama’s big government plans. That’s when the Tea Party Express sent out a statement that the central purpose of the 35 events would be to “rally Americans to oppose Barack Obama’s government-run health care proposal.”

This movement has a lot of supporters, but it has been largely invisible nationally since it burst upon the scene earlier this year. Lately a number of groups large and small have been increasingly active in the health care fight.

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