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OTTAWA Radio host Joe Walsh was excited Tuesday evening at the La Salle County TEA Party meeting at Pitstick Pavilion.

Something big happened! he shouted to the crowd of 80 or so attendees, referring to the election of President Donald Trump. I dont think everyone really understands what happened regular Americans won.

Walsh is a former congressman elected from the Illinois Eighth Congressional district in the northwestern Chicago suburbs as part of the Tea Party wave in 2010. He was voted out in 2012 after redistricting pushed him against Democrat Tammy Duckworth. His radio program, The Joe Walsh Show, is promoted as The New Voice of Freedom and can be heard on 560 AM radio in Chicago.

But Walsh tempered his expectations. He thought Trump might be too much of a strongman, and used the example of the calling up companies to force them to keep factories in the United States.

Even though Trump won on Nov. 8, the things we believe in didnt win. Not yet, he said. Anger won Conservatism didnt win. The free market didnt win. Tea Party principles didnt win. Righteous anger won. And thats a good thing.

Walsh told the crowd that he had been saying it for years the candidate that could tap into Americas anger would be president.

But even while the movement didnt win in November, Walsh told the crowd that it was an opportunity for the movement, and Trump could enact some of the policies the Tea Party wants.

It was a step, its a good step. Its a step thats going to get us some good policy. Talking to people as I do, Donald Trump is going to reduce taxes, we are going to reform the tax code, he said. I do believe hes going to build a wall, I do believe and you may see some cool executive orders tomorrow, where Donald Trump may temporarily ban people from certain countries.

Let me remind everybody that is American as well! he shouted at the audience. This is our country. We have every right under the sun to determine who comes here. We have every right under the sun to discriminate when it comes to people who come here And we can say Yeah, you know what? We dont want Muslims here. The point is we have a right to say that. This is our country. Donald Trump is going to move on that issue.

Walsh also spoke about more local issues when answering questions.

On congressman Adam Kinzinger, Walsh said the Channahon Republican doesnt represent the district.

This is a rock-solid-all-American-Donald-Trump-Im-angry-and-I-want-my-country-back district, he said. This is a conservative district. Thats not who Adam is. He shouldnt be representing this district, thats not who this district is.

On Gov. Bruce Rauner, Walsh said he supported what the governor is trying to do for Illinois but hes not selling it to the people well.

He has done a lousy job marketing what hes doing. Hes trying to save this state; what hes doing is good. Hes done a lousy job explaining that, Walsh said. Because of that, his reelection is going to be real tough.

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'Righteous anger won' radio host tells local Tea Party - LaSalle News Tribune

There has been, as Jim notes, a fair amount of talk on the Democratic side especially after Saturdays rallies about imitating the grassroots-driven protest energy that the Tea Party brought to the Republican party in 200910. Democrats should think long and hard about whether they are prepared for the implications of that.

To start with, its worth remembering what Democrats thought, or at any rate said, until this week. First, they spent the past eight years calling the Tea Party a bunch of racist, unpatriotic terrorists and now they want in on that! Second, they also spent the past eight years chortling about how self-defeating the Tea Party was for Republicans and even if the outcomes in the House, the Senate and all the other states had been exactly the same, theyd still be saying the same thing today (even louder) if Hillary Clinton had won Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

But set aside the hypocrisy, which is not that much different from that of Trump supporters who spent eight years calling Obama the devil and simultaneously brag about Trump imitating his tactics. Are Democrats really ready for the level of disruption that a true Tea Party of the Left would bring? This is, after all, the same political party that gloried in using its superdelegates to cut off Bernie Sanders path to the nomination, and that takes great pride in its top-down organizing structure. (Indeed, a major reason House Republicans are wary of holding health-care town-halls this year is knowing that Democrats can easily bus in out-of-district rent-a-crowds from their professional activist cadre.) The Democrats 2006 comeback, after all, was a classic D.C.-run operation, as Rahm Emanuel carefully cultivated Democratic candidates who were more in tune with swing voters in their districts than with the DailyKos Left, which wanted more Ned Lamonts. When the progressives finally captured the partys leadership, they did so behind a man Barack Obama who owed much of his career to the favor of the Chicago machine and who was equally at ease raising a billion dollars from the partys established donor class.

The Tea Partys vitriol in 200910 was directed just as much at the D.C. and professional leadership of its own party, and that exacted a heavy cost on veteran politicians like Charlie Crist, Robert Bennett, Dick Lugar, Mike Castle, Eric Cantor, and David Dewhurst in a series of bloody primary battles in 2010, 2012 and (to a lesser extent) 2014. Tea Party challengers forcibly retired GOP veterans in the safest of deep-red states and districts, and they cost the party winnable elections in swing races (the CastleODonnell primary being the most obvious example). Even if you think the movement has been on balance a boon to Republicans, the costs have been undeniable, and they fell disproportionately on the partys efforts to control its own strategy.

This is especially true in the Senate. The dynamics of off-year elections hurting the party in power should be expected to favor Democrats by 2018, but the 2018 Senate map is absurdly loaded against them: Republicans are defending just eight seats (nine if a special election is held in Alabama to replace Jeff Sessions), and only four of those are in states where Trump got less than 57 percent of the vote and one of those is Texas, and another is Utah, where Mike Lee won his Senate race by 41 points. Democrats, by contrast, are defending ten Senate seats in states Trump won, some of them very-deep-red territory:

A good national environment can help alleviate a lot of those vulnerabilities, but only if Democrats are running candidates appropriate to their states. The Democrats who ran the best in 2016 in red states Jason Kander and Evan Bayh, who ran far ahead of Hillary Clinton in Missouri and Indiana, and Roy Cooper and Jim Justice, who won the governors races in North Carolina and West Virginia didnt run as wild-eyed leftists (Kanders campaign took off after an ad bragging about how he supported Second Amendment rights as a state legislator while assembling an AR-15 blindfolded). Primary challenges that replaced people like Manchin and Tester with urban-style progressives would likely be as suicidal as running Christine ODonnell in Delaware, and just as likely to elevate some amateurs who were not ready for prime time.

A true Tea Party of the Left would also target safe-district elected officials who are corrupt and out of touch with their constituents, as is true of but look how ugly that got when Charlie Rangels district had an open primary in June.

Be careful what you wish for, Democrats. You just might get it.

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Do Democrats Really Want Their Own Tea Party? Be Careful What You Wish For - National Review

The massive marches this weekend will be remembered as the starting point of a massive protest movement against President Donald Trump, but what will become of the sleeping giant that has awakened?

If the extraordinary energy that was on display across the country is effectively channeled into electoral politics, some of the long-term demographic trends that Trump's victory obscured will accelerate. He could be the last Republican elected president for a long time.

But a new protest movement could also upend the Democratic establishment, just like the tea party movement did eight years ago. With the president viewed as illegitimate by so many progressive activists, even small compromises will be viewed as apostasy. This could fuel nasty primary challenges, without a president in the White House to stop them, and prompt a lurch to the left that would make it harder to topple Trump in 2020.

FOR REPUBLICANS, THE CAUTIONARY TALE OF PROPOSITION 187:

The protests foreshadowed the long-term damage that Trump might be inflicting on the Republican brand. I found myself wondering what percentage of people in the streets hadn't voted in 2016 and whether they will in 2020. Both statistics are important but unknowable.

Trump is a reactionary figure, but the long arc of American history bends toward reform. With his pledge to "make America great again," the septuagenarian president tapped into nostalgia for a bygone era among fellow baby boomers. But the "good old days" were not so good for lots of folks, including but not limited to women, gays, Latinos and African Americans.

Every time Trump did something like attack Judge Gonzalo Curiel, which House Speaker Paul Ryan called the textbook definition of a racist comment, I raised the specter of Proposition 187 in this space. California Republican Gov. Pete Wilson embraced a ballot measure to deny all public services, including education and health care, to undocumented immigrants. The idea was to adopt a wedge issue that would gin up the base and woo disgruntled independents as the state struggled to fight its way out of the post-Cold War recession. Wilson ran ads with footage of Mexicans running across the border. "They keep coming," a narrator said ominously. The campaign to push the ballot initiative was called "Save Our State," as in SOS.

What a lot of people forget about Prop 187 is that the gambit worked - in the short-term. Republicans cleaned up in that election, though the measure was quickly blocked by a federal court. But while Wilson won the battle, Republicans lost the war. The GOP candidate for president carried California in nine of the 10 presidential elections before 1992. Democrats have won handily in all six elections since Prop 187.

Significantly, Prop 187 didn't just alienate a generation of Latinos, galvanizing them to register to vote and get engaged in the political process. It also repelled moderate suburban whites who wanted no part of nativism and xenophobia. To be sure, correlation is not causation. There were demographic trends that were making the state bluer before the measure passed, but it supercharged them.

Latinos were not inevitably going to become a lynchpin of the Democratic coalition. Just compare California to Texas, where George W. Bush proved during his gubernatorial bids around the same time that a conservative can make inroads with the community.

National conservative leaders warned publicly in 1994 that what Wilson was doing would hurt the whole party in the long term, just as they did when Trump launched his campaign by declaring that many Mexican immigrants are rapists, criminals and drug traffickers. "He's scapegoating, damn it, and he should stop doing it," Bill Bennett, who had been Ronald Reagan's Education secretary, said of Wilson at the time.

While Trump won the election in the Rust Belt, he was weaker than past Republicans in the Sunbelt. Mitt Romney carried Arizona by nine points in 2012, for example, but Trump only won by 3.6 percent. It's hard to imagine the Grand Canyon State not being in play next time. And don't forget that a shift of fewer than 100,000 votes would have tipped Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan to Hillary Clinton. It's not like he can count on a realignment working to his advantage.

One small but telling illustration of how little the Trump administration actually cares about expanding his coalition:The Spanish-language version of Whitehouse.gov no longer exists. You get a 404 error if you try to visit.

FOR DEMOCRATS, A CAUTIONARY TALE IN THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT:

Right now, the Democratic coalition is united in opposition to Trump. But the edifice could begin to show cracks as issues like Obamacare replacement and infrastructure spending come to the forefront.

While a lot of establishment leaders - like John Kerry - came out for the Women's March, it was revealing that the leading candidates for DNC chair were instead courting deep-pocketed donors at a conference put on by David Brock in Florida. That they were not out in the streets, standing in solidarity, didn't go unnoticed among some grassroots leaders.

The Democratic establishment is giddy right now about all the new enthusiasm, but veteran organizers warn that it will be harder than it looks to channel it toward sustained engagement in the political arena. "Saturday's marches, which featured speeches from many leading Democrats, were not explicitly Democratic events," The Washington Post's Dave Weigel and Jenna Portnoy note. "Melissa Byrne, a candidate for DNC vice chairman, said that the crowds . . . will encourage even more people to become activists. But having organized for Barack Obama's 2008 campaign and for the Occupy D.C. movement, she saw how the new activists would be tested even if the rallies grew in size. 'People are going to get frustrated, because you want your wins to come quickly,' she said. 'For people who are new to this, it takes a while to get that.'"

After the governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey this fall, next year's biggest battles in the midterm elections will play out on deeply-red terrain. There are just two clearly at-risk GOP senators up for reelection, in Nevada and Arizona. Jeff Flake, the Arizona senator, is more worried about getting toppled during the primary by a challenger who has the endorsement of President Trump than losing in the general election. Few GOP senators have separated themselves more from Trump.

To be sure, something that made Saturday so special was how many marches took place in red states and small towns where Trump dominated. The Post's Jose DelReal notes that sizable crowds gathered in places like Wichita, Kansas, rural towns in Virginia, and throughout the South: "In Anchorage, thousands of protesters gathered despite an unforgiving snowstorm and 10-degree temperatures, holding signs with slogans such as 'My body. My rights. My choice.' Farther north, in Fairbanks, thousands were undeterred by the extreme temperature, which approached minus-20 degrees. At the same time, thousands marched outside the Idaho Statehouse in Boise as snow fell over them."

But party leaders could quickly lose control of the energy, if they don't play their cards right. Take Nevada. The smartest operatives on both sides agree that Sen. Dean Heller is the most vulnerable GOP incumbent on the ballot next year. But what happens if the Democratic Party - now that Harry Reid has ridden off into the sunset - nominates its own Sharron Angle, who subsequently blows a totally winnable race? People like Angle and Christine O'Donnell only got oxygen in the 2010 primaries because the tea party movement turned on the governing class.

Furthermore, Trump's success as a first-time candidate will embolden an array of celebrities and billionaires to consider coming out of the woodwork. Keep an eye on Mark Zuckerberg, Howard Schultz and Mark Cuban. They'd try to run as outsiders and use their fortunes to tap into this activist energy. It could lead to a very messy battle over what it means to be a Democrat.

James Hohmann is a national political correspondent for The Washington Post.

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The liberal tea party movement has begun. What will become of it? - Chicago Tribune

Pundits keep puzzling over what party President Donald Trump belongs to, since he emphatically is not an orthodox Republican, even though he sails under the GOP flag. But the answer is simple. He is the Tea Party president.

Just think back to 2009, when the Tea Party movement began with CNBC financial commentator Rick Santellis furious on-air rant against Barack Obamas stimulus package. How many of you people want to pay your neighbors mortgage, that has an extra bathroom and cant pay their bills? Santelli asked the traders behind him on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. When they roared their disapproval, Santelli invoked the Founding Fathers and announced that he was thinking of staging a Tea Party in Chicago, fair warning that citizens were fed up with taxation without representation and a government that, like George IIIs, had become swollen with a multitude of New Offices, as the Declaration of Independence had put it, and with swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

Santelli was more prophetic than he knew, for the stimulus saved few Americans from foreclosure on their over-leveraged houses. Instead, it mainly kept state and local government workers employed, while the citizens whose taxes formerly payed their salaries were losing not just their houses but also their jobs. If Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson could see what America had become and was becoming, Santelli spluttered, theyd roll over in their graves. It was certainly not the republic they created, and that Franklin had warned wed need steadfast vigilance to keep.

But we failed to keep it; and it turned out that millions of Americans shared Santellis sense of that failure and his red-hot anger over it. Millions who signed up for local Tea Party chapters and rode buses to rallies from coast to coast recognized that somehow we had lost the Constitution that the Founders had given us, and that we now lived in a polity those great men wouldnt recognizeand that was certainly not the one described in our history books, with its strictly limited powers and its exquisitely designed checks and balances. What exactly it was, and how it had slouched into being, the Tea Partiers didnt really know, but they saw that it was closer to rule by a government without the consent of the people than to the self-government, liberty, and self-reliant and self-realizing pursuit of happiness that the Founders had envisioned.

Commentators are right that a big portion of Trump voters were working-class Americans displaced from their jobs by Obamas war on fossil fuels, by globalization, automation, and the shifting balance in manufacturing from the importance of the raw materials that go into products to that of the engineering expertise that designs them. These are the people Trump referred to in his Inaugural Address as the forgotten men and women of our country.

But thats only part of the new presidents coalition. As Amity Shlaes shows in her 2008 book The Forgotten Man, that term, which Franklin Roosevelt applied to the man on the breadline in the Great Depression, the man at the bottom of the economic pyramid, more properly applies to those unhappy-if-silent taxpayers who funded the New Deals social-welfare schemes. And these are the forerunners of the Tea Partiers, another key class of Trump voter: the widow on a fixed income whose property-tax payment helps house a public-sector retiree comfortably but whose inexorable rise is making her own paid-off home unaffordable; the retiree whose IRA savings the Great Recession eroded or who can no longer get an adequate income from safe bond investments, thanks to the Federal Reserves policies; the small businessman or farmer ruined by undemocratic government regulation lacking even the pretense of due process; the ex-soldier abandoned by a dysfunctional Veterans Administration; the parent disgusted with public schools that impose ideologies she abhors on her children, while leaving them inadequately educated; and all those sincere believers in God or traditional values whom Obama dismissed as clinging desperately to outmoded pieties, as the arc of history, which the elite professor-president claimed to understand and direct according to his politically correct enlightenment, swirled them down the drain.

The Tea Partiers wanted a second American Revolution that would sweep away the Administrative State that the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the War on Poverty set loose to devour and fatten on the carcass of the Founders republic, replacing a government of limited and enumerated powers with an unlimited government that rules by administrative decree and redistributes wealth as if it belonged to the governors and not the governed. No wonder Obamas Internal Revenue Service worked to squash that movement as tyrannically as George IIIs tax collectors. Lets see if the new revolutionaries picked a leader who knows what they want and how to get it.

Myron Magnet,City Journals editor-at-large and its editor from 1994 through 2006, is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. His latest book isThe Founders at Home.

Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

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Our Tea Party President - City Journal

Gonzalo Martinez De Vedia, Jeremy Haile and Sarah Dohl, Tribune News Service 1:14 p.m. ET Jan. 24, 2017

More than 1 million rally during the Million Women's March on Washington in Washington, D.C., Saturday, Jan. 21, 2017. (Dawn J. Sagert photo)(Photo: Dawn J. Sagert)

Donald Trump represents a grave threat to liberal democratic values. On Capitol Hill, Republicans are falling in line and some moderate Democrats have signaled a willingness to cut deals. But ordinary Americans have the power to resist. We know this is true because we have seen local, grassroots organizing take hold before.

Eight years ago, two of us worked as congressional staffers and the other in immigrant rights organizing. President Obama had taken office with large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress and seemed poised to enact many of our shared priorities. Another force was taking shape, however, that would eventually bring federal policymaking to a halt.

The tea party protests began early in 2009, as small groups of conservative activists organized against government intervention in the housing and financial markets. By summer, they had grown into a formidable opposition movement, flooding congressional offices with angry letters, emails and calls. Enabled by a media that thrives on conflict, these minority voices soon dominated the national discourse.

When members of Congress retreated to their districts for what should have been an uneventful summer of little league games and pancake breakfasts, tea party activists awaited them. Two of us worked for Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, who was mobbed in an Austin parking lot by protesters carrying Revolutionary War battle flags and signs denouncing "socialized health care." Their simple chant, which would soon become familiar, was, "just say no."

The tea party organized for the 2010 midterms, targeting both Republicans and moderate Democrats. By the time the dust had settled, Democrats had lost their large majorities in Congress and, with their lost seats, any hope of realizing a bold progressive agenda.

Although their policy ideas were destructive, the tea party demonstrated that a small group of activists can take on a newly elected president with a majority in Congress and win.

Now it's our turn.

We learned two key lessons from the tea party's success.

First, they organized locally, focusing on members of Congress in their home states and districts, pushing them to use every available tool legislation, letters, public statements, media interviews to oppose Obama's every move.

Under Trump, similar efforts will be just as important in "blue" districts as anywhere else. By keeping relentless, local pressure on progressive members of Congress, we can embolden them to stand firm. We can remind them that making nice with an administration built on racism, authoritarianism and corruption is not bipartisanship it's collusion.

The second lesson we learned from the tea party is that we need to play defense. The movement's members understood that if they tried to choose among competing conservative priorities, their coalition would fracture. Rather than putting forward plans to stimulate the economy or to improve the health care system, they chose to "just say no." The tea party kept its movement strong, broad and unified by concentrating relentlessly on opposition.

Loud, localized resistance is already proving effective against the new GOP regime.

On the first day of the new Congress, Republicans moved to hamstring the Office of Congressional Ethics. Within 24 hours, activists had taken the fight to the home district office of Rep. Robert W. Goodlatte, (R-Va., who had led the effort, demanding a meeting and posting video of their visit on social media.

They took the "just sayno" approach, and it worked.

Republicans' swift retreat affirmed that every constituent's voice across every state, in every district, red or blue will be vital to expose and block what we expect will be an aggressive attempt to remake government in Trump's image.

To stand united in opposition is not about abandoning a positive vision for the future. Progressives should continue working to develop policy ideas. But for the next two years, at least, we can't set the agenda, we can only respond to it.

If the tea party's approach could stop President Obama, it can stop President Trump. Unlike his predecessor, Trump lost the popular vote, and has no mandate. He also has slimmer majorities in Congress than Democrats had eight years ago.

Americans against Trump are in the majority. If we want to resist his agenda, we have to do it together, and we have to start now.

You can find like-minded people through a website we started, Indivisible, or start your own group. Meet in person. Tell your member of Congress to represent you, not Donald Trump. Together we can win.

Gonzalo Martinez de Vedia, Jeremy Haile and Sarah Dohl are contributors to "Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda."

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OPED: To stop the president, imitate the tea party - York Dispatch