(1) Voter Registration

(2) Get-out-the-vote infrastructure development and implementation

(3) Voter fraud detection and prevention

Every tea party and 9-12 group around the country should be undertaking projects right now to focus on these three areas.

The best national coordinating groups that can provide assistance in these areas are:

United in Purpose for voter registration.

Election Day Tea Party for get-out-the-vote infrastructure development and implementation.

True the Vote for voter fraud detection and prevention.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter and ElectionDayTeaParty.com. His new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, was recently published by Broadside Books. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy.

Stop laughing. Just hear me out.

I’m 35 years old. And though you make think I’m already old enough to draw Social Security, I can assure you that I’m not and can still clearly remember what it’s like to be young(er).

Because of that, I understand why the Tea Party isn’t exactly the coolest thing on campus. Though toga parties seem to remain a winner, I haven’t heard of any where people are sporting knee-length pants, tri-corner hats, and powdered wigs. I’m not really a partygoer myself, but even I would be creeped out by something like that.

But the Tea Party isn’t about being cool (obviously) or social networking or feeling good about oneself; it is primarily about one thing: saving some semblance of freedom for your generation.

I know, it sounds melodramatic—but it’s true. There are many examples of how your freedoms are being rapidly stripped from you in ways you likely don’t even see, but for the purposes of this article, I will focus on the one I believe to be the biggest.

The national debt.

While this topic may seem well suited for a crowded lecture hall where you normally catch up on sleep, believe me, it’s hard to overstate its impact on your future. Consider that the national debt is roughly $15.5 trillion. That is real money our nation owes to real people who expect us to pay it back. And the payments must come from the taxes we forfeit from our own wallets.

It may be difficult to conceptualize what the total debt means to you personally, but all you have to do is divide it by the 320 million people living in America, and you discover that your share of the load is $48,437. If that weren’t bad enough, America’s unfunded liabilities (future debt for which no money has been set aside) are estimated to be anywhere from $60 to $118 trillion. Let’s be conservative and take the low number, adding it to the $15.5 trillion, and round down what we collectively owe to an even $75 trillion. That increases your individual share to $234,375. And this doesn’t even include any student loans for those of you that have—or will have—them.

Is this getting real to you yet?

Now—answer this: Which demographic is suffering the highest employment in America?

You got it: young people. In fact, the Associated Press just reported that more than half of four-year college grads under 25 are either unemployed or underemployed.

The staggering national debt and high unemployment rate, especially among young people, are a direct result of the Big-Government policies our nation is advancing. It took America roughly 200 years to accumulate its first trillion in debt, but President Obama has accumulated five trillion in three years alone. We’re borrowing at a rate of 333 times as fast as we did over our first two centuries of existence. And this is done by the same person who when he was Senator Obama less than four years ago said, “The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt from $5 trillion for the first 42 presidents—number 43 added $4 trillion by his lonesome, so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back—$30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic” (emphasis added).

I would add staggeringly immoral to that assessment, for he was exactly right: to fund our government’s reckless spending we were (are) borrowing from nations like China and foisting the debt on future generations (you) who had no say in the matter. In fact, most had no idea it was (is) even happening. Furthermore, we have also inflated our money supply at an unprecedented level, making our dollar worth far less than it used to be.

So to summarize: you have been saddled with an enormous debt without your permission, you face a terrible job market to try to make some money to actually pay off the debt, and the little money that you do have holds ever-diminishing purchasing power. Oh, and by the way, the $75 trillion America owes is more than the combined money supply of the entire world. There is simply no way to pay it off. Which means that your generation as inheritors of this debt is facing blinding taxes, resulting in far greater unemployment and a loss of freedom you probably can’t even imagine.

Okay, let me stop here and say that I’m not trying to depress you. Honestly. I’m simply illustrating the fruits of Big Government … and offering you a real solution.

The Tea Party.

Our support for limited government and fiscal responsibility are your best shot at hanging on to some semblance of freedom and not spending the rest of your life working for the government to pay off all the money they borrowed in your name. If you want to have any ability to provide a good living for yourself (and possibly a family someday), you will join with us in demanding an immediate and dramatic reduction in government spending across the board and a balanced budget to start getting our debt under control. And to jumpstart our dying economy, you will help us push for a simplification of the tax code and massive reductions in regulations and taxes on businesses, which would help them grow and create jobs and bring many back that have been shipped overseas.

Believe me, I know that declaring yourself a member of the Tea Party may treat you to some strange looks or snickering at your upcoming social gatherings, but in the long run that will seem like a small price to pay for preserving your freedom. So join with us in protecting your future by helping your local Tea Party—or starting one of your own, especially if you’re on a college campus—to find and support those political candidates who will advance the principles of limited government and fiscal responsibility. Plenty of them will be running. And if we elect enough of them this November (and beyond), your generation may help prevent an economic catastrophe for all of us, but especially for you.

What could be cooler than that?

Jonathan Wakefield is a leader of the Richmond, Virginia Tea Party. He is the author of Saving America: A Christian Perspective of the Tea Party Movement and the novel Fatal Reality (a thriller), both of which are available on Amazon.com. Visit his websites atwww.teapartyforchristians.com and www.jonathanwakefield.com.

The despair of faint-hearted conservatives deepens when they contemplate President Obama’s disastrous performance in office. His record of fiscally reckless extremism is unparalleled in American history. In three short years, federal spending as a percentage of GDP has climbed from 20% to 24% while the national debt has exploded from $10 trillion to $15.5 trillion. By the end of his term, Obama will have increased the national debt by a staggering 67%.

Add to this record President Obama’s continual disrespect for the Constitution, his unceasing regulatory attacks on free enterprise and small businesses, his rhetoric of class warfare, his deceptive demagoguery and his spendthrift economic policies that have fattened the wallets of his political cronies but created so few jobs that millions of Americans have simply dropped out of the labor force, and many conservatives can offer only one explanation for Obama’s current lead in the polls.

America, they conclude, must have lost its can-do spirit of rugged individualism and replaced it with what Governor Chris Christie recently called an attitude of “paternalistic entitlement” championed by a coalition of political elites, acolytes in the mainstream media, crony capitalists and an ever-growing dependency class.

Conservatives across the nation should be of good cheer, however. The United States remains a center-right nation. This November, voters will choose common sense over fiscally reckless extremism in what will be a landslide conservative victory. Republicans will retain the House, gain the Senate and win back the presidency with a 2-to-1 Electoral College margin.

You can read the rest of the story at The Daily Caller.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter and ElectionDayTeaParty.com. His new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, was recently published by Broadside Books. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy.

A comparison of President Obama’s proposed budget to Ryan’s proposed budget for the next five years, from FY 2013 to FY 2017 shows that while Obama’s current plan continues his pattern of financially reckless extremism, Ryan’s modest cuts do very little to bring the federal government’s expenditures into the kind of balance consistent with our “fiscal constitution.”

In FY 2011 the federal government spent $3.6 trillion, exactly 24% of the $15 trillion of GDP created in the United States during the same twelve months. That’s a record peacetime high, the result of three years under an Obama Administration characterized by financially reckless extremism  and a  Democrat-controlled Senate who, for 1000 days, has deliberately violated one of their core duties by not passing a federal budget.

To put the scale of Obama’s profligacy in perspective, consider this: During his three years in office, the amount he’s increased spending—(the current 24% of GDP is an additional 4% of GDP higher than the 20% of GDP the federal government spent in George W. Bush’s last year) equals the average annual federal peacetime budget during the 142 years between 1789 and 1931 when politicians lived by our “fiscal constitution.”

When I speak of the “fiscal constitution” I mean the universal agreement among politicians and the populace that during peacetime, the federal government could only make expenditures for which a corresponding tax revenue can be identified. Our Founding Fathers unanimously felt that the federal budget should be treated in the same way as the family budget. Current consumption should be paid for by current tax revenue, and never by incurring debt. Debt should only be used to finance defense expenditures during times of war

Under President Obama’s budget, spending in FY 2012 will increase to $3.8 trillion, while Congressman Ryan proposes to hold spending at $3.6 trillion. Under Obama, spending in FY 2013 will remain at $3.8 trillion, but rises to $4.5 trillion in FY 2017, the first quarter of which will be his last year in office. Ryan proposes to cut spending to $3.4 trillion in FY 2013, but increases it to $3.8 trillion in FY 2017.

Under both plans, we continue to experience annual spending deficits. Under Obama the annual deficits, even under the rosiest scenarios for economic growth, hover around $1 trillion annually. Under Ryan’s plan annual deficits drop to a “mere” $300 billion by FY 2017.

As I argue in my new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, we face a stark choice as a country. We must either drastically cut our spending in half from the current level of 24% of GDP to 12% of GDP, or we will certainly increase spending to 36% of GDP—putting us in the same category as European countries like Greece.

That’s a level consistent with 142 years of our “fiscal constitution” tradition, and breaks down as follows: 4% for the “normal” operations of the federal government, 6% for defense, and 2% to service and reduce the national debt.

How do the Obama and Ryan budgets stack up according to this standard?

Assuming a 3% annual increase in GDP, under Obama’s budget, federal government as a percentage of GDP increases to 25% in FY 2017. Under Ryan’s plan, it decreases to 21% in FY 2017. That’s not an insignificant improvement, but it still higher than George W. Bush’s FY 2008 budget, which put federal spending at 20% of GDP.

The Washington Post called Ryan’s plan “bold but risky,” but in my view, there’s little boldness in a plan that increases federal spending as a percentage of GDP beyond George W. Bush’s last year. While President Obama’s plan puts us on a path to become an economic basket case like Greece within a decade, the Ryan plan merely delays the day of reckoning by a few years.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter and ElectionDayTeaParty.com. His new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, was recently published by Broadside Books. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy.

“The conventional thinking has been that after a long and divisive primary campaign, the challenge of uniting the GOP would force Romney to pick a running mate with strong appeal to tea party activists and evangelicals. But Romney’s team thinks he may be liberated from that pressure if he can finish off remaining rivals Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul in the next few weeks. ”

Hayes wonders if Romney can build on the “great strides [he’s made] with Tea Party leaders in the past two weeks.”

I have the quick answer to that question:

Not if he and his team think they’re “liberated” from us.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the editor of the Voices of the Tea Party e-book series and co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter and the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition. His new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, was published by Broadside Books on March, 2012. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy .

Four Broken Promises: Why the Tea Party Arose

The story of civilization can be told in the conflict between the individual’s desire for liberty and the state’s need to establish social order. Every government, once established, seeks to centralize and consolidate its own power at the expense of individual liberty. This is as true for a democratic republic as it is for a constitutional monarchy, an absolute monarchy, and oligarchy, or a dictatorship.

From the moment the citizens of a country bind themselves in a constitutional covenant that guarantees the rights of the individual and defines and limits the powers of the government, the battle lines are drawn between the faithful defenders of that covenant and those who seek to corrupt it.

The Tea Party movement arose in 2009 because the political class of the United States–in the form of members of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of our government–broke four promises found within the Constitution, thereby accelerating the natural tendency to centralize and consolidate power at the expense of individual liberty.

The first promise–to abide by the written words of the Constitution–was broken before the ink was dry on the last documents that sealed the uniquely American secular covenant contained in our Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The second promise–to refrain from interfering in private economic matters–was broken whent he modern party that routinely pays homage to “free markets” first came to power. The third promise–to honor the customs, traditions, and principles that make up the “fiscal constitution”–was broken by Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelet 143 years after the Constitution was ratified.

Had not the fourth and final promise–that members of the legislative branch would exercise thoughtful deliberation while giving respectful consideration to the views of their constituents–been broken in such a disdainful and audacious manner in January and February 2009, the grassroots activists who came to be known as the Tea Party movement would never have been compelled to action.

Myth #1 – The Tea Party is losing its political power.

The mainstream media and the Democratic Party keeping flogging the dead horse that the Tea Party movement has peaked. They point to the lack of public rallies of the sort that characterized 2009 and 2010 as evidence. Balderdash, respond local tea party activists from around the country. We’ve moved on to more important things–like organizing to get-out-the-vote.

Yesterday’s results proved that the Tea Party movement is not only live and well–it’s thriving.

The Tea Party movement claimed another victim among incumbent GOP politicians in Ohio’s 2nd Congressional District, where 4 term GOP incumbent Jeanne Schmidt was upset by tea party challenger Brad Wenstrup, 49% to 43%, despite outspending him by a 3 to 1 margin.  The  noise you hear in the distance is the fearful expectations of a pair of old GOP Senate bulls about to experience serious Tea Party challenges in their primaries–Indiana’s Richard Lugar and Utah’s Orrin Hatch.

Exit polls also showed that GOP Primary voters are strongly supportive of the Tea Party movement. 62% of Tennessee voters fit that category, as do 59% of Ohio voters.

Myth #2 – Tea Party supporters won’t vote for Mitt Romney.

Exit polls in the two most contested states provide evidence that this oft-heard claim is untrue. In Ohio, supporters of the Tea Party movement virtually split their support between Rick Santorum (39%) and Mitt Romney (36%). Gingrich and Paul lagged far behind. In Tennessee, Santorum (39%) beat both Gingrich (27%)  and Romney (25%) among Tea Party supporters. While it’s clear that Tennessee tea partiers prefer Santorum to Romney, a 14% margin is not exactly a tsunami. And Romney beat Gingrich, the only one of these three who deserves credit for helping launch the movement in 2009, in Ohio, and effectively tied him in Tennessee.

While it’s true that very few local tea party leaders have endorsed Romney, that strong opposition appears not to have translated into unbending opposition among the tea party rank and file.

With a hat tip to Mark Twain, it’s fair for those of us in the Tea Party movement to let the Democratic Party and the mainstream media in on this poorly kept secret: “Reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.”

Michael Patrick Leahy is the editor of the Voices of the Tea Party e-book series and co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter and the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition. His new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, will be published by Broadside Books in spring, 2012. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy .

“The politically aggressive Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has quietly created a national network of at least eight community-organizing groups, some of which function alongside the Occupy Wall Street movement…”

Meanwhile, country club conservatives around the country are dawdling. They should be providing financial support to local tea parties–those groups that are doing the tough work of building the conservative get-out-the-vote infrastructure that will be needed to defeat President Obama in November. Currently, these efforts are being financed by the spare change collected from the couches of the dedicated local tea party leaders around the country.

Where are country club conservatives putting their money?

They’re sending it to the Republican National Committee, which hasn’t run a decent get-out-the-vote operation since 2000. They’re also sending it to the four Presidential candidates, none of whom, other than Ron Paul, are doing much to build a true grassroots operation. Instead, they’re spending millions on nasty attack ads aimed at their primary opponents which do little other than suppress conservative voter turnout and enrich one of the least deserving groups on the planet–Republican campaign consultants.

One place country club conservatives aren’t putting their money is where it will have the most impact in this November’s elections–in the local tea parties that have the manpower and the enthusiasm needed to get voters to the polls.

Meanwhile, those billionaires the left erroneously claims financed the tea party are spending their time and money in frivolous and egocentric pursuits that are light years from local grassroots tea party. The Koch Brothers, for instance, are embroiled in a hard nosed battle to take control of the Libertarian Cato Institute. Foster Friess is dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into a Rick Santorum Super PAC that does nothing but create and air television ads.

Local tea parties are prepared to drag the Republican Presidential nominee across the finish line to victory, but if country club conservatives and boisterous billionaires on the right wanted to have some distance between our guy and President Obama when Election Day rolls around in November, they would be well advised to change their priorities and start putting some money into local tea party get-out-the-vote efforts.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the editor of the Voices of the Tea Party e-book series and co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter and the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition. His new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, will be published by Broadside Books in spring, 2012. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy .

Santorum deserves great credit for engaging with the Tea Party movement and rhetorically aligning with our three core values: (1) constitutionally limited government, (2) fiscal responsibility, and (3) free markets.

Unfortunately, Santorum subsequently demonstrated that it’s one thing to rhetorically align with those values and quite another to do so substantively.

Prior to hearing Santorum’s Chattanooga speech, I had criticized him severely for his poor economic policy. Specifically, I agreed with the Tax Foundation when it gave his tax policies a D+, citing his especially egregious proposal to try to pick “winners and losers” by giving all manufacturers special tax breaks. Earlier last month, before the Chattanooga speech,  Santorum announced his “Economic Freedom Agenda,” which included a proposed that while all other corporations should  pay income tax at a rate of 17.5%, manufacturing companies should pay no corporate income tax at all.

This Hamiltonian strategy of promoting an industrial policy in which the federal government picks winners and losers is antithetical to the tea party’s third core value of free markets. As I argue in my new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, there is great evil in a tax code that authorizes the government to take money from certain groups of citizens and give it to other groups. Santorum’s proposal to offer special tax breaks for manufacturers is but another example of two centuries of politicians trying to take from one group and give to another. Before 1913, they used tariff laws. Since 1913, they’ve used the federal tax code.

Every time the federal government promotes policies that subsidize the activities of one group over another, our country’s scarce resources are misallocated.  We end up using too much corn to produce ethanol, so food prices go up. We subsidize solar companies who make products no one wants, and they go bankrupt. And we give high income earners tax credits to buy electrical vehicles manufactured by state-run General Motors, and there’s so little demand for Chevy Volts, production has to be halted.

After the Chattanooga speech, Senator Santorum gave us reason to hope that his intellectual evolution to constitutional conservativism had moved beyond mere rhetoric and into the realm of action. In last Monday’s Wall Street Journal,   Santorum noticeably omitted his “zero income tax on manufacturing” proposal, mentioning  only “repatriated” manufacturing profits earned in foreign countries by domestic manufacturers.

Many of us in the Tea Party movement took notice. Had Santorum decided to align with our core value of free markets?

Alas, this omission of proposed manufacturing tax breaks appears to be nothing more than a weak attempt to avoid criticism from the many free market conservatives who read the Wall Street Journal.

Santorum finally confirmed last week that he stands by his Hamiltonian views of offering manufacturing tax breaks at the 1:22 mark in this interview with John Harwood of the New York Times and CNBC:

What are we to make of this unfortunate decision by Senator Santorum?

Time to turn our attentions to Governor Romney as well as Senator Santorum. After all, Governor Romney finally started engaging with local tea parties in his hard fought Michigan primary victory.

Where Santorum has actively engaged with the Tea Party to great effect, the response to Governor Romney has been tepid at best. Romney has steadfastly refused to repudiate RomneyCare, supported the TARP bailouts, and aims low when it comes to spending cuts (his official position calls for cutting federal expenditures to 20% of GDP, but only recently he cautioned against making any immediate spending cuts.)

While Senator Santorum has done well with Tea Party friendly rhetoric, his specific proposals have been little better than Governor Romney’s. Rhetorical flourishes are meaningless unless accompanied by the corresponding actions.

The race for the Republican nomination is not over quite yet, and the Tea Party needs to give both of these candidates yet one more chance to align with our core values.

Given the abysmal state of the Republican Party’s get-out-the-vote infrastructure, it’s going to be up to the Tea Party movement to drag the Republican Presidential nominee across the finish line to victory. As the eventual nominee  will be relying upon us to secure their Electoral College majority in November, Governor Romney and Senator Santorum should begin to align both their rhetoric and their substantive policies more closely with our core values.

Let’s hope that both these candidates begin to do just that.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the editor of the Voices of the Tea Party e-book series and co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter and the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition. His new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, will be published by Broadside Books in spring, 2012. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy .

Why is Santorum surging, Romney stalling, Gingrich sliding, and Paul holding steady?

His success comes more from his strategy of engaging voters in a one-on-one retail approach than it does the specifics of his policies. While he appealed to the strong current of evangelical voters in Iowa, and laid out a very credible foreign policy approach, we can’t ignore his Big Government approach to spending and social issues.

If we were to look to a seventeenth century figure in the Anglo-American culture who Santorum’s policies most resemble, it would be the authoritarian Christian communitarianism of Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first governor John Winthrop to whom we would point, not the Christian natural liberty of English libertarian John Lilburne.

The Cato Instititute’s David Boaz recently pointed out Santorum’s poor track record of support for the limited government ethos that defines the Tea Party movement.

Michael Barone notes that Santorum’s deft explanation for his endorsement of RINO Arlen Specter over conservative Pat Toomey in the 2004 Republican Senate Primary in Pennsylvania (Specter’s re-election was critical, Santorum said, because he was needed to usher Alito and Roberts on to the Supreme Court) was only half of the story. Barone points out that Santorum, the political operative with 16 total years in Congress, owed his 1994 election to the Senate to Specter’s support.

Santorum’s tax proposals, however, are so bad that the respected Tax Foundation gave him a D+. Instead of simplifying the tax code, Santorum would maintain its present complexity. Worse yet, he favors the Hamiltonian strategy of picking winners and losers through the tax code, providing a variety of incentives to favored industry. Manufacturing, which struggles in his native Pennsylvania, gets special tax benefits.

Comparing Santorum’s policies to those of his two main competitors–Gingrich and Romney, Santorum is only slightly less Hamiltonian. Santorum distinguishes himself from these two in one key regard — he opposed the TARP bank bailouts of October, 2008.

Why, then, does Santorum enjoy more than a 2 to 1 advantage over both Gingrich and Romney among Republican primary voters who consider themselves tea party supporters?

There are three reasons:

1. Santorum is authentic and consistent in his views.

2. He is likable and approachable.

3. He genuinely engages with local tea parties around the country.

Romney, for reasons that continue to remain a mystery to me, appears to be following a strategy of actively avoiding the Tea Party movement. To my knowledge, he has never addressed an actual tea party rally or local tea party group. In December, he spoke on the phone at a tea party tele-town hall with other Presidential candidates, but that appears to be the extent of his direct communication with the Tea Party movement.

This remoteness–an odd strategy to keep Romney in a “bubble” away from potential supporters–seems to permeate his campaign. In Ohio last week, for instance, Attorney General Mike DeWine withdrew his endorsement of Romney and endorsed Santorum. “He doesn’t write, he doesn’t call,” DeWine said of Romney.

Gingrich, who has a long and twisted history with the movement, has, until recently spoken at numerous tea party rallies, but has never really actually modified his policies according to communications he’s received at these rallies, at least as far as I can tell. And where Santorum appears friendly, upbeat, and approachable, Gingrich appears a bitter, scowling, intellectual elitist. Santorum is blue collar, Gingrich is academic cap and gown.

This Saturday, for instance, Santorum will be the featured speaker at the Third Anniversary Celebration of the Tea Party movement to be held in Chattanooga Tennessee, hosted there by the local tea party. Romney turned down a similar invitation, giving Santorum an open running field to garner tea party support around the country. This is not the first time Santorum has spoken to local tea party groups. Last week he was a featured speaker at a tea party gathering in Ohio. Clearly, Santorum has realized the value of showing up and engaging with tea parties, especially in states like Tennessee and Ohio, where Super Tuesday primaries will be held on March 6.

The lesson from Santorum’s recent success should be his tactics more than his message. Retail politics works. Television ads, robocolls, email blasts and the like are increasingly “white noise” –irritating background ignored by most voters.  The election of 2012 will be decided more by neighbors talking to neighbors they trust than it will be traditional media. Age old person to person  grassroots politicking is experiencing a resurgence. And that’s a good thing for the country.

Michael Patrick Leahy is the editor of the Voices of the Tea Party e-book series and co-founder of Top Conservatives on Twitter and the Nationwide Tea Party Coalition. His new book, Covenant of Liberty: The Ideological Origins of the Tea Party Movement, will be published by Broadside Books in spring, 2012. He can be reached on Twitter at @michaelpleahy .