Pacific Sun : Upfront: It's my Tea Party--and I'll cry out against Obama if I want to!

Signup for Express

Join Us

Pacific Sun News

Send this story

Print this story

Adjust text size

Uploaded: Friday, March 12, 2010, 1:15 PM

Upfront: It's my Tea Party--and I'll cry out against Obama if I want to!
Conservatives rally against president, climate-change science, universal healthcare, Soviet-era Russia...

by Ronnie Cohen

MILL VALLEY — Al Anolik, a gray-haired Tiburon attorney and lifelong Democrat who turned Republican to support the 2008 McCain-Palin presidential ticket, wanted to drape himself in an American flag for a gathering of the Bay Area Patriots. Unable to find star-spangled clothing locally, he bought a button-down shirt studded with stars and wavy stripes on the Internet.

The Tea Party--an unstructured populist uprising that helped elect Republican Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's Massachusetts Senate seat and has been working around the clock to block President Obama's agenda--came to Mill Valley on Sunday. Anolik wore his crisp red, white and blue shirt proudly while he stood near the door of the Mill Valley Community Center and talked to a man sporting a Reagan T-shirt and a National Rifle Association baseball cap.

"I had my Palin sticker torn off my car every time I would park," he said. "I did not think we would have this kind of gathering in Mill Valley."

None of the more than 500 people who paid $5 each to attend the afternoon event--part fair and part pep rally--or the more than 100 turned away for lack of space, had seen so many conservatives assembled together in Marin County in recent memory. An older Republican said it was the largest conservative gathering here since Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president. Marin, after all, is the place former President George Bush Sr. dubbed the home of hot-tubbing liberals. And this is where, only a little more than a year ago, nearly 78 percent of voters cast their ballots to elect Barack Obama president.

Sally Zelikovsky, a 48-year-old San Rafael non-practicing attorney and mother of three, threw the party. A hodgepodge of more than 30 conservative, independent, libertarian and Republican groups and candidates set up tables and distributed pamphlets, fliers, buttons and bumper stickers. "Government Run Healthcare Makes Me SICK," one button read. "Global Warming: Science by Homer Simpson," read a bumper sticker. "I sleep like a Democrat," read another. "I lie on one side...then I lie on the other side."

They come together to fight what they perceive as the Democrats' agenda of supersized government. First and foremost, they have a bone to pick with the president and oppose any healthcare reform bill he might sign. But the focus of their messages can differ. Some zero in on stopping illegal immigration. Others support school vouchers, building nuclear power plants or drilling for oil off our coasts. Some see global warming as baloney.

• • • •

MANY OF THE Tea Party activists came of age in the turbulent 1960s and 1970s but were not spurred to political action until the bank, auto-industry and mortgage bailouts. They have been gathering supporters and momentum as a social movement since they began working together on a platform of limited government, lower taxes, individual liberty and fiscal responsibility. Last April 15, they held a series of anti-tax tea parties here and across the nation, giving birth to the Tea Party.

In Mill Valley, under a banner of "Faith, Family, Freedom," American Independents sold miniature apple pies sprouting American flags. Calling them "humble pies," they said they baked them for one of their favorite targets--Nancy Pelosi--referring to the House Speaker from San Francisco's use of a pie metaphor about healthcare reform needing to be baked before she could sell it.

A tall woman with curly black hair, Zelikovsky wore a bright red T-shirt proclaiming "Join the Tea Party," with a "Reset 2010" button, a jeweled American flag and a gold Jewish star necklace. She stood behind a flag-draped podium holding a microphone in one hand and a pie flying an American flag in the other and told the audience: "Shame on you Speaker Pelosi. It's time for you to eat..."

The crowd eagerly finished her sentence, shouting back--"Humble pie!"

"You're all having an impact," Zelikovsky said. "We'd have Obamacare right now if it weren't for each and every one of you."

Some of the participants in Sunday's Tea Party described themselves as struggling small-business owners worried that healthcare reform might drain already limited profits. Many live in Marin, though some traveled from San Francisco, Sonoma County, the East Bay and the Peninsula. Some did not want their names in the newspaper for fear exposing their political leanings would cost them clients or jobs.

Asked his name, a man gathering signatures for a ballot initiative requiring the city of Novato to contract only with firms that verify their workers have documents allowing them to legally work in the U.S. ripped off his name tag. "This is a politically volatile topic," he said. "If you're bidding on a job, and you're known to have political opinions that are unpopular, it can hurt you.

"We're just trying to turn off the jobs magnet that draws illegal immigrants to our city and country in great numbers."

A woman who looked to be in her 70s approached the anti-illegal-immigration table. "They sell fruit by my house," she said disgustedly with an accent. Asked where she was born, she replied, "I'm Cuban-American. I came before the revolution. I live here for 51 years."

She refused to give her name or age. But Charlie Betzner, who lives in Mill Valley and drives a UPS truck, was not so shy. He walked up to the table with the petition about illegal workers in Novato and said, "It's time to seal this border and kick these people out."

He expressed empathy with illegal workers. "They're poor people. Most of the Hispanic people are nice. They're good workers," he said. "I understand."

He reserved his wrath for liberals. "When I express my views, the liberals get so angry, it's ridiculous," he said. "They're only tolerant if you agree with them."

Betzner disagrees politically with most of his neighbors, but having lived in Mill Valley since 1989, he's accustomed to being a lone voice. "I never saw a president derided like President Bush, and if anyone disagrees with Obama, you're called a racist," he said. "We need some civility here."

• • • •

THE VAST MAJORITY of the Mill Valley attendees were white, but one African-American woman from Pinole, Congressional candidate Virginia Fuller, roused the crowd. "I say enough is enough. Let's build that fence high and fast," she said, describing herself as a legal immigrant. "Together we can take America back. She is worth fighting for."

The only other African-American visible in the crowd was Carl Smith, a bald 47-year-old Novato plumber wearing small hoop earrings, jeans and a T-shirt that spelled out the president's name: "One Big Ass Mistake America."

"I'm at home here," he said, surveying the sea of white faces. "This is my family.

"I don't like Obama because I believe he's a socialist. If socialism worked so well, how come everybody wants to come to the United States?"

Smith said he grew up believing that as a black man he was supposed to be a Democrat, and until about five years ago, he was. Then he began to think that government handouts keep poor people down and Democrats in office.

"The Democrats always need someone to suck off the tit of America to stay in power," he said.

Most of the tea partiers were middle-age and older. But Aaron Neighbour, a San Jose State University junior wearing a "College Republicans" T-shirt and an AK-47 bullet on a chain around his neck, came with his girlfriend, Sarah Thompson, a junior at the University of California, Berkeley.

"I get out of there as fast as I can every day," Thompson said of the campus that earned a reputation for student activism in the 1960s.

Neighbour said he used to wear the bullet necklace in solidarity with his friends serving in the military. Nowadays, he wears it simply because he owns an AK-47 rifle. Smiling, Thompson looked up adoringly at her clean-cut boyfriend and said the two of them had a blast the other day shooting targets with his gun.

Neighbour and Thompson and other attendees walked from table to table, exchanging ideas and business cards, and listened to a series of speakers, most of them candidates for political offices--from the state Legislature and governor to the U.S. Congress. Brian Sussman, who hosts a KSFO talk-radio show called "Right Thinking from the Left Coast," also addressed the group.

"Is anyone from the former Soviet Union?" he asked the audience.

A San Rafael man raised his hand.

"Do you know April 22?" Sussman asked him.

"Yes. It was drilled into my head. It's Lenin's birthday."

"It's also Earth Day," Sussman said, linking the environmental movement with the Communist Russian leader. "It's all in my book, Climategate. The book probably won't be a bestseller in Mill Valley."

He promised the book, due out next month, would give his fans all the tools they need to discredit global warming.

The Tea Party's formal program began with everyone pledging allegiance to the flag and listening to four girls from Windsor sing "The Star-Spangled Banner." Then candidates delivered short stump speeches.

Dana Walsh, a Republican who plans to run against Pelosi for her San Francisco Congressional seat, spoke first. "We now have a government that is completely out of control but is intent on controlling every aspect of its citizens' lives," she said. Walsh's campaign literature included more photos of the House Speaker Republicans love to hate than of Walsh herself.

Karen Molden lives in Sleepy Hollow and serves on the GOP Central Committee out of Novato. She so wanted Zelikovsky to run for Congress against Democrat Lynn Woolsey that she volunteered to tutor and transport her children to and from school. Not ready to throw her hat in the ring, Zelikovsky has brought Bay Area conservatives, particularly Marin County conservatives, out of the closet and into the political arena.

A Democrat for many years, New Jersey-born Zelikovsky said she found herself turning Republican when she returned from a two-year stay between 1993 and 1995 in Russia. Like Carl Smith, she began to see government programs intended to help people as holding them down.

"People rise out of poverty when they're provided opportunity, as opposed to just throwing money at them," she said. "In Russia, I saw the vestiges of everybody having the same and the disincentive that is created when people are assigned apartments and jobs.

"The fear is that as the government gains more power in our lives, in healthcare, in our schools, in energy, we have less control of our lives, and we have less freedom. As the government redistributes our wealth and tries to make us all the same, it creates disincentives, and it is depriving people of their hard-earned income.

"We saw the government essentially taking over the auto industry. You want your innovation coming from the private industry, not the government. Go to FedEx and then go to the post office, the DMV."

Feeling lonely in her political beliefs in a county where Republicans say their bumper stickers are stolen from their cars, Zelikovsky said she began "collecting" conservatives a few years ago. In 2007, she threw a cocktail party in her San Rafael home, and for a few hours, she was able to freely express her conservative views. One party led to another until she put together Sunday's.

"There are lots of conservatives in Marin," Zelikovsky said. "Most of them often hide in the shadows. Listen, you lose friends. You would think we had some sort of dread disease."

But Sunday's Tea Party liberated Zelikovsky and her friends. "It's just a shot in the arm," Molden said of the gathering. "The change is coming that's gonna be the good change."

For more information on the Bay Area Patriots, go to www.bayareapatriots.com. Contact Ronnie Cohen at ronniecohen@comcast.net.

Are you receiving Express, our free daily e-mail edition? See a sample and sign-up for Express.

Comments

Posted by MarinCountyMom, a resident of the Novato neighborhood, on Mar 12, 2010 at 9:20 pm

It's nice that you gave them a platform to share their views, but did you have to write it with such a condescending tone? I would like to see the tea party and the coffee party assemble together, since I drink both (literally and figuratively).