Michael Graham is a Boston-based talk-radio host and frequent contributor to National Review Online for going on a decade. Recently the master of ceremonies at the Tax Day tea party in Boston, Graham talked to NRO’s Kathryn Jean Lopez about his new book, That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom — which is certainly one way to say “Hi, Mom” with political resonance.
KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: When did you first find out that your mother is a “right-wing domestic terrorist”?
MICHAEL GRAHAM: Believe me, nobody was more shocked than I was to discover that Pat Graham — grandmother, office manager, and soprano in the church choir — was in fact a Timothy McVeigh wannabe staking out federal buildings in her spare time. If you think I was surprised, you should have seen my mom.
LOPEZ: Are you overdoing it a bit there?
GRAHAM: Have you seen MSNBC lately? Or listened to President Clinton? According to them, it’s just a small step from “no more bailouts” to “token right-wing villain on 24.”
LOPEZ: Are you sure you should be so adamant about defending the tea partiers? Some of them are nuts, aren’t they?
GRAHAM: Of course there are nuts at tea parties. After all, I attend them.
But most of the “nuttery” is actually exaggeration, not delusion. For example, I think saying that President Obama is a Communist is silly. But as I write in the book, “socialist” was a title Obama himself wore proudly when running for office in Chicago and was used by the mainstream media to describe his philosophy when he was first elected. And the fundamentals underlying Obamacare are, in their essence, socialist. So when tea partiers were waving “Say No to Socialism” signs a year ago, were they crazy, or prescient?
LOPEZ: You write, “In Barack Obama’s America, ‘normal is the new freak.’” Well, a lot of freaks must have elected Obama president, then. What has to happen to keep them from doing it again?
GRAHAM: Barack Obama absolutely was elected by “normal people,” not his far-left base. Some were simply voting against Republicans as a way to vote against George W. Bush. Others wanted to cast a positive vote for a narrative of race relations in America. Still others voted for the biggest celebrity.
To keep this from happening again, I sincerely believe all we need to do is point. President Obama, the first American president who just doesn’t like Americans very much, is constantly attacking, insulting, and demeaning the fundamental American values that folks like my mom live by. Average Americans reject this time and again, so if we just stand up and go, “Look — he’s doing it again! More government and less freedom!” I think we’ll win.
The core premise of the book is that President Obama isn’t engaged in a debate over specifics like tax rates. It’s a debate over the character of America. Individual responsibility vs. collective action; rewarding achievement vs. “spreading the wealth”; self-reliance vs. bailouts.
These issues are fundamental, and typical Americans again and again reject the Left’s vision for a new, Europeanized America. That’s what brings folks like my mom out to tea parties.
LOPEZ: Are you confident that people like your mom who have “kept quiet for a while” about politics are going to stay active now?
GRAHAM: It’s pretty amazing to watch as the tea-party movement develops its own dynamic. The people I’ve met are excited about what they’re doing, and want to do even more. One of the first things I heard after last year’s April 15th tea party in Boston was “So, when do we do something?” So I put together some candidate training classes just to show people how to get on the ballot, or help a friend run a viable campaign. We expected about 75 people for the first one, had 125 show up. The week after Scott Brown’s victory, we had room for 325 people and were forced to turn away 100 more. These people have protested enough. They are ready for action.
LOPEZ: Is Rick Santelli the father of the tea-party movement?
GRAHAM: Good question. I actually recount the origins of the current tea-party movement in the first chapter of the book.
Rick Santelli definitely played a key role, absolutely. But if I had to name the parents of the tea-party movement, I’d pick Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit and Michelle Malkin. Their websites were the most prominent and active in spreading the idea of the tea parties. They spread the word, and average folks like Christen Varley in Boston grabbed the idea and ran with it.
The first tea party . . . wasn’t. It was a protest in Seattle against the stimulus package in February 2009, the day the plan was signed into law. The organizer, Keli Carender, had never been part of a protest before. In fact, she told me she had to call the city Parks Department and ask them, “Where do people have protests?”
So I’d call Rick Santelli the godfather of the tea-party movement, except I don’t want David Axelrod to put a horse’s head in the poor guy’s bed.
LOPEZ: Did you make up any of the “love letters from the Left” examples you print? Even the one about the Hollywood director talking about his own father?
GRAHAM: Every quote is verbatim. I could never be as funny on purpose as Joe Biden is by accident.
LOPEZ: Amherst is “entirely dominated by America-hating O-bots”?
GRAHAM: Yes. It’s the only place I know of where Gitmo detainees are more popular than the American flag. And, alas, that’s not a joke.
LOPEZ: What exactly is this “O-bot”?
GRAHAM: An “O-bot” is a mind-numbed, obedient follower of the Dear Leader, also known in the book as the “Smartest President Ever®!”
LOPEZ: In all seriousness, Janet Napolitano does not really think you are a terrorist.
GRAHAM: Really? Tell that to the pro-life activists in Wisconsin who were assessed as a terror threat by the Obama administration’s Department of Homeland Security. The book makes the counterargument to the “tea-party terrorist” case through (mostly) comedy, but reality is more serious and more disturbing.
LOPEZ: Why does Sarah Palin get under Barack Obama’s skin? After all, she’s just a half-term governor, and he’s president of the United States.
GRAHAM: In a move that risked ending my career as a pundit, I dedicated a chapter in the book to proving that America would be demonstrably better off if we had President Palin today instead of President Obama. When I pitched it to my editor at Regnery, he actually gasped. In fact, it was a pretty easy chapter to write.
That’s because, on issue after issue, Palin has been proven right, while the “super-smart” liberals who hate her have gotten it wrong. The most glaring example is the New York City terror trials. The Obama administration still can rescue themselves from their own stupidity and just say “No KSM in NYC.” A President Palin would never have made such a dumb decision in the first place.
Do I think Sarah Palin was prepared to be president in 2008? No. She was just more prepared than Barack Obama.
LOPEZ: How is Obama “a living political Rorschach test”?
GRAHAM: Because his public life has been spent avoiding action and, instead, allowing others to project their values and desires upon him. It’s part of the “vote present” strategy. Tell everyone what they want to hear, do as little as possible to put yourself on the record, and then everyone feels good about supporting you.
LOPEZ: Surely you exaggerate when you write “to be brutally honest, in the end it was all about race with me.”
GRAHAM: Not at all. As I said in the book, I never took the idea of voting for Barack Obama seriously, because I have a very simple rule: I never vote for candidates who spend 20 years attending a racist, anti-Semitic, anti-American church. Pretty simple rule.
I think it’s ironic, listening to people who hear more racism in “It’s time to take back our country!” than they do in a sermon by Reverend Wright.
LOPEZ: You lived around the corner from the KKK? How does that color your view of racial politics?
GRAHAM: I have absolutely no tolerance for race-based politics. When I hear white voters whine about how “the only person you can discriminate against is the white, Christian male,” I just roll my eyes. The fact is, it’s still harder to be black in America than white.
Having said that, I also reject the victimhood politics of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. For it’s also a fact that Barack Obama would never have been taken seriously as a candidate for president in 2007 if not for his skin color.
I write in the book about how my mom had to deal with real racism when we first moved to South Carolina in the 1970s. It makes the current whining about imagined racism insufferable.
LOPEZ: You write, “Everyone knows that ‘government-run’ is Washington-ese for ‘it sucks.’” How do you justify that when government seems to be trending toward running more in the hands of the democratically elected?
GRAHAM: There’s a new Pew poll showing that trust in the government is at historic lows, and that the desire for government action has plunged well below 50 percent. This really is “change.” My theory is that what voters imagined government might do was a lot prettier than what a big government actually does.
What Ronald “Government is the problem” Reagan couldn’t accomplish in eight years, Barack “We are the change we have been waiting for” Obama and his team have done in just 18 months.
LOPEZ: What’s the lesson of Scott Brown’s election?
GRAHAM: There are no safe seats for Democrats in 2010. None.
LOPEZ: What’s the most important takeaway from your book?
GRAHAM: Writing this book revived my faith in the American people. Talk-radio listeners, tea-party attendees, typical Americans like my mom really do get the fundamentals. They may have been intoxicated by the “hope and change” elixir in 2008, but they sobered up quickly and headed to the nearest rally.
The other fascinating thing I learned writing this book is how important women are in the tea-party movement. A recent poll showed that 55 percent of tea partiers are women — a very unusual percentage in the world of talk radio and conservative media.
But at my book signings, I have more women than men, and many of them say “I am the angry mom!” or “This is for my mom, who taught me to stand up and get involved.”
So it looks like women like my mother are leading the way in fighting President Obama and his far-left agenda. And I’m confident my mom will do a fine job.
As long as nobody asks her to cook.
– Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor-at-large of National Review Online.