http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/magazine/08Armey-t.htmlNovember 8, 2009
MAGAZINE PREVIEW
Dick Armey Is Back on the Attack
By MICHAEL SOKOLOVE
I.
At sunset on a September evening, Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, strode to a lectern set up in the parking lot of a Harley-Davidson dealership in Hickory, N.C., where about 300 people had gathered to hear him speak. He was dressed less like a Washington power player and more like someone intending to clear brush. Armey, who is 69, wore black jeans, a red Western-cut long-sleeve shirt and a white cowboy hat. He removed the hat before he started and set it down in a visible spot, like a prop, right beside the microphone.
The crowd at the Harley dealership, the last of three stops in North Carolina that I made with Armey that day, included blue-collar workers, small-business owners, military retirees, a couple of teachers. Many were receiving benefits from Social Security and Medicare. From my conversations with them, though, it is fair to say that they were people who tend to distrust the hand of government and suspect that big initiatives from Washington will take something away from them, whether they have a little or a lot. Their way of thinking — libertarian, anti-Washington, old-fashioned get-out-of-my-way-and-I’ll-make-it-on-my-own American self-sufficiency — is as old as the republic, and Armey, who grew up in a North Dakota pioneer town called Cando (pronounced can do), plays to it in every speech.
“Nobody has ever lived on this earth with the prosperity, the tranquillity, the safety, the security, the freedom and the peace that we Americans have enjoyed,” he said that evening as a fading sun lighted the parking lot. “Europe is governed by a concern for the well-being of the collective. That’s what they care about. What makes us different is we begin with the liberty of the individual. We got it right, and they got it wrong.”
Since retiring from the House in 2003, Armey, like legions of other former elected officials, has burrowed into Washington’s establishment, never fully returning home to his 89 acres north of Dallas, his “ranchette,” as he calls it. For most of the last half-dozen years, he has worked in the lobbying shop of the giant law firm DLA Piper while also serving as chairman of FreedomWorks, a nonprofit organization that in 2008 paid him $550,000. For Armey, it is the early 1990s all over again — the last time, as he put it to me, “the Democrats had their hands on all the levers.” Back then, as a Republican leader in the House and an ally of Newt Gingrich, Armey worked to defeat the Clinton administration’s health care plan. Now, in his role with FreedomWorks, which helped stage a big march on Washington in mid-September, he is again at the center of the opposition.
Armey and his organization have operated nimbly, seeding and supporting protests against policies of the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress while taking care not to be seen as controlling the dissent from on high. The march on Sept. 12 was largely organized by FreedomWorks, which secured the permits and opened the podium to a range of speakers — including those from the like-minded but separate Tea Party movement. The stated purpose of the march was to “defend” liberty and reduce the size of the federal government. (According to an unofficial estimate by a city official, the march drew between 60,000 and 75,000 people; organizers claimed a much higher number.)
FreedomWorks staff members have been studying the tactics of Saul Alinsky, the community organizer from Chicago whose thinking has influenced, among many others, Barack Obama. Adam Brandon, who accompanied Armey in North Carolina and is the press secretary for FreedomWorks, told me he was excited by the prospect of more direct action — like that undertaken by antiwar demonstrators in the ’60s or, more recently, anti-abortion and other social conservatives. Armey himself has been traveling the country in support of favored political candidates, not all of them running on the Republican line. In a special election in upstate New York, he backed a third-party candidate for Congress over a Republican whom he did not consider sufficiently conservative on economic matters.
Defense — stopping forward motion — is Armey’s preferred political mode. Back in 1994, during the last health care debate, he told The Washington Post: “Health care happens to be the play they called. They’re the offense. We’re the defense.” On his own terms, Armey is best measured by what he prevents rather than what he achieves, because his goal of small government often means blocking new initiatives.
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