“I don’t see any way that Hillary Clinton won’t be president.” Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, who currently chairs the free-market advocacy group FreedomWorks (full disclosure: I used to work there), made headlines with that assessment earlier this year at a Conservative Leadership Conference. In a conversation with National Review Online, Armey confirmed that he does indeed think Hillary will win, but he also said he and his group do not intend to spend 2008 on the sidelines.
“This is a case where you’ve got to start setting off the alarms early,” he says.
FreedomWorks is in the midst of an ambitious campaign to expand its e-mail list from 142,000 members to 1 million between now and the election, according to vice president for interactive media Chris Kinnan. The idea is to create a political movement on par with
MoveOn.org, only fighting for the right ideas. Armey claims that one issue in particular is going to motivate people to get involved: HillaryCare.
“The unfortunate thing is, especially the way things are going electorally, [that issue] is probably going to be a defensive issue from our point of view,” Armey says.
You have to predict she will win the election. There is no doubt about it; Hillary’s going to have her way on that. She doesn’t take no for an answer very easily, and she’s going to come back with a vengeance on this — this effort to nationalize our health care system.
Armey explains carefully how he plans to be involved in 2008: “We are not a partisan organization,” he says of FreedomWorks.
We don’t work on behalf of one political party or another. But we do work on behalf of liberty, and HillaryCare is about a reduction in your freedoms. As a consequence of that, I think you can get a lot of people very actively involved, saying, “We’ve gotta stop this thing. We’ve gotta stop the emergence of the electoral configuration that will make this possible. Because she’s serious. She means it.”
“The best way to keep a person from diminishing your liberties is to keep them out of office,” he says.
FreedomWorks faces a couple of obstacles to having the kind of impact MoveOn’s been able to make. For one thing, it has a narrow focus on economic issues, whereas MoveOn supports just about every bad idea the left can come up with; the site has capitalized particularly on the left’s antiwar fervor. FreedomWorks doesn’t get involved in national-security debates. However, Armey says that his group focuses on an issue that has just as much potential to rile up the conservative base, and that House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel has handed him a great gift by proposing a trillion-dollar package of tax hikes.
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