A New Tea Party Resource – The Ensuring Liberty PAC

Nashville, TN: As Sarah Palin spoke to the standing room only, sell out crowd at Tea Party convention, activists from across the nation were putting together the finishing touches on a strategy to channel the activism in an entirely new way. The result is Ensuring Liberty, a 501(c)4 and affiliated PAC.

Many pundits debated the lessons from the the New York “23rd race” and the heralded defeat of Dede Scozzafava and subsequent loss of Doug Hoffman. A couple things were clear. The Club for Growth money that went to Hoffman was not enough to bring home a winner. It was equally obvious from the loss, that the national outpouring of grassroots support from Tea Party activists all over the Country was not enough.

What was clear to those closer to the campaign was that all of the assistance poured into a flawed operation could not put humpty dumpty together. An axiom from business holds that before you automate a process you must first perfect that process. The cash and volunteer support were in effect the automation that the Hoffman campaign desperately needed. The “machine” however, lacked the fine tuning so that most of the “inputs” ended up as waste and proportionally little product flowed out of the campaign apparatus.

Every campaign needs at least two critical element pairings; campaign and money or campaign and people. Hoffman had plenty of money and people but too little campaign. Next time, the Tea Party supported candidates will have all three elements. Enter, the Ensuring Liberty PAC.

From the founding documents:

The Ensuring Liberty Corporation, a 501(c)4, and its affiliated PAC, the Ensuring Liberty PAC (ELPAC) were formed to address the next step in the growing impact of the TEA Party movement through fund raising, candidate recruiting and the development of a Congressional Caucus of like-minded representatives that stand for the TEA Party “First Principles”. These first principles are:

• Fiscal Responsibility
• Lower Taxes
• Less Government
• States’ Rights
• National Security

In short, Ensuring Liberty will combine the money of Club for Growth and the grassroots mobilization of the Tea Party movement with a proprietary “‘campaign tool kit'” that enables a standard set of electioneering practices” to make sure the money and people inputs result in super-efficient outputs. This should satisfy both donors and “doers” as will the commitment that their support will be limited to candidates who fully embrace these unifying first principles.

Another unique feature of Ensuring Liberty is that successful candidates will be expected to caucus in support of the first principles knowing that their fidelity or lack thereof will be reported to the Liberty PAC membership. The Ensuring Liberty caucus member who turns his back on the principles, will expect the membership to turn their backs to him.

Many in the mainstream media will get the facts wrong. In fact, the announcement of the PAC by board member Mark Skoda received over 1000 media hits, many of which made wild erroneous assumptions. So to all the MSM editors out there, here is a serving of facts on the new Tea Party PAC. Have some more fun spinning them.

Ensuring Liberty will target a limited number of key races in 2010 with a plan to target many more in the following cycles and fully restore America to her first principles. Activists in Congressional districts unlikely to change will be steered to support candidates where ELPAC is at work.

ELPAC plans to work within the two party system rejecting as counter-productive, any effort to create a third political party. The PAC founders are already busy fulfilling the goal of raising $10 million in the 2010 cycle. They expect to raise these funds primarily from small donors.

Ensuring Liberty isn’t a PAC for politicians. Rather, it will focus its support on those patriots who have answered our nation’s call and stepped forward to run for office, often with little experience in the political realm. ELPAC will help them with the tools they need to run effective campaigns and–most importantly–win this fall.

Ensuring Liberty will ensure victory this November.

Let me add, finally, that I know there has been much debate about the next steps the overall tea party movement should take. Whether it should stay focused locally or evolve into a regional or even national organization. There are passionate patriots on all sides of this debate and it shows the strength and health of the movement. But, Ensuring Liberty isn’t really part of this debate.

Ensuring Liberty isn’t about leading or changing the tea party movement. It is a tool, a complement to whatever the tea party becomes. ELPAC is a resource to ensure that the best candidates run the best campaigns they can this fall. With your help, this time, I know our side will win.

On to battle.