Tom’s Tavern in Phoenix was “packed to the rafters” Monday
morning, Barbara Espinosa told me. “You could hardly move.”
The tavern was the scene of a “Health Care Town Hall” event
hosted by J.D.
Hayworth, the former Arizona Republican congressman who is
now a popular talk radio host on KFYI in Phoenix.
President Obama was in town to address the annual convention of
the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and Ms. Espinosa was a member of
the crowd who marched from Tom’s Tavern to the Phoenix Convention
Center to welcome the president, carrying signs with slogans
like, “Pull the Plug on ObamaCare” and “Marx Was Not a Founding
Father.”
Had Ms. Espinosa not been in the crowd, I wouldn’t have known
about the protest. She posted a notice
of the Tom’s Tavern rally on her blog and, using her cell
phone, sent me photos of the protest that I
posted on my blog.
Welcome to the Information Age, where somebody’s grandma is
changing the world one Facebook update at a time.
A Texan by birth, Ms. Espinosa is reluctant to publicize her age,
but if it were reported that she was born when FDR was president,
she might have been born the day before FDR died and Harry Truman
took office. Or not.
At any rate, she is a lively twice-widowed grandmother, a shrewd
businesswoman and licensed real-estate broker who has embraced
online technology with youthful enthusiasm. And she’s fired up
about fighting the liberal agenda.
We met Saturday in Pittsburgh, where I filed a
brief account about the RightOnline conference that Ms.
Espinosa attended. While I worked from a computer terminal in the
hotel lobby, Ms. Espinosa was working at a nearby terminal and
when she said she was updating her blog, it got my attention.
“You’ve got a blog?” I asked, with perhaps a bit too much
astonishment, and thus began a conversation that didn’t end until
after midnight.
Widespread public perception that the average blogger is a
goateed 22-year-old dropout living in his mother’s basement has
no basis in fact. Most leading political bloggers are over 30,
well-educated and have successful offline careers. Townhall’s
Hugh Hewitt —
a 53-year-old Harvard alumnus — is more typical of top-tier New
Media personalities than any scruffy dropout. “Instapundit” Glenn Reynolds
(Yale Law, Class of ‘85) will turn 50 next year and — as
astonishing as it may seem, given her youthful appearance —
Michelle Malkin
(Oberlin ‘92) will turn 40 next year.
While the blogosphere is not merely a playpen for young
underachievers, blogging grandmothers are unusual — but perhaps
Ms. Espinosa is on the cutting edge of the New Media revolution
in this regard. She was not the only grandmother in attendance at
the RightOnline
conference, which featured workshops on blogging, Facebook
and the latest online tool, Twitter.
The Pittsburgh conference was organized by the Americans for
Prosperity Foundation, and AFP has also worked closely with the
Tea Party movement,
which spawned Monday’s protest event
in Phoenix.
Liberals have claimed that the involvement of AFP and other
free-market organizations — including FreedomWorks and Americans for Limited Government
— proves that the Tea Party rallies are inauthentic “Astroturf”
events controlled by Corporate America. When the Left organizes
protests, that’s called “community organizing” and “patriotic
dissent”; when the Right does the same thing, that’s called a
“conspiracy.”
Like other Obama administration talking points, there is little
evidence for these insinuations that the Tea Party protests are
puppet shows orchestrated by Wall Street fat cats and Republican
bigwigs. Tea Party crowds are not afraid to boo GOP speakers —
Sen. John Cornyn got
booed in Texas — and those crowds usually include a few
disillusioned ex-Democrats of recent vintage.
At the Pittsburgh conference, I interviewed Donna Scala, who
explained that in her hometown of Beaver Falls, Pa., she finds
herself “talking to Democrats who voted for Obama, but this isn’t
the ‘Change’ they voted for.”
Not every Democrats weary of eight years of Bush’s “compassionate
conservatism” expected that a vote for Obama would be interpreted
as a mandate for massive “stimulus” spending and other
pork-packed legislation that Congress never bothered to read
before passing it. Nor, apparently, had every Obama voter thought
too hard about the Democratic candidate’s promises to provide
health care to everyone, while also lowering the health-care
costs, reducing the deficit and cutting taxes.
The haste of Obama and congressional Democrats to ram through
health-care “reform” before anyone could check the fine print has
added new fuel to a populist backlash that began building before
the ink dried on the “stimulus” bill.
Nearly every Tea Party protest features that enduring populist
emblem, the Gadsden Flag’s coiled rattlesnake with its famous
“Don’t Tread On Me” warning. And the aroused rabble are
increasingly using the Internet to spread the word. Ms. Espinosa
has more than 250 Facebook friends,
most of them fellow activists.
When a
DNC ad accused Republicans of “inciting angry mobs” at
town-hall meetings, it was grassroots activists like Ms. Espinosa
they were talking about. Perhaps this will create an economic
opportunity for some clever capitalist sloganeer: “My Grandma Is
An Angry Mob — And All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”
