Our strategy is to change the political climate so that what is politically unacceptable now becomes a political imperative in the future. For example, it is now political suicide to try to change Social Security. We will make it political suicide to leave it fester till it collapses. Our tax system is unwieldy, yet no one can do anything but make changes at the margin. We need to make it politically unacceptable to leave it as it is. It needs to have a radical changeover.

We also need to change our idea as to what it means to be a good citizen. Right now, if you vote once every four years and don’t cause any trouble, you are considered a good citizen. We need the average citizen to realize that he needs to be informed, engaged, and active politically. Our opponents are. We cannot abandon the battlefield to them and let them win by default.

We need to change how we elect our candidates for congress. Right now, we seem to pick someone who is “comfortable” or someone that we know. If he/she looks good, talks reasonably well, and has not been implicated in some sort of scandal or illegal activity, he/she will get our vote. If he/ she has been our congressman and hasn’t done anything particularly bad, he/she will get our vote again. We vote for people who have slick campaigns and glossy literature. We vote for people that “bring home the pork”. This needs to stop. We need to start voting for people based solely on how they vote for us. Are they voting for things that increase our freedom and improve our national economy? If so, they deserve our vote. If not, they don’t. We will accept no excuses for a bad vote. A bad vote with the best of intensions hurts us just the same.

Our methods are fairly straight-forward. We petition our politicians with e-mails, phone calls, and letters. However, we recognize that a letter will not change the mind of a politician, unless he/she gets a LOT of them. Even then, it doesn’t always work. We realize that most politicians think that they are smarter than we are and will not take our advice, no matter how logical it is. We view our letters as a sort of “straw poll” for the politician to see. This is a head’s up on how we intend to vote. Our real power is in the vote itself. There may be a lot of time between the two. However, as we change the political climate, politicians will come to realize that we don’t forget and we are not distracted by the rhetoric, pork brought home, impeccable clothes, or glossy literature. It will take time, but they will learn.

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