Welcome Cleveland 9.12 members!

This weekend, The Cleveland 9.12 Project closes down, and Cleveland Tea Party Patriots welcome members who want to continue the efforts to restore America to the country our founders envisioned. Front burner projects in Feb. and March, will be an Action Alert to phone your Columbus legislator when the Ohio Healthcare Compact gets out of committee. A short video explaining the Compact is here. We all need to be familiar with this legislation, as one of the biggest challenges is to educate our family, friends, and neighbors about this initiative.

SAVE THE DATE: February 20 at 8 p.m. Tele-Town Hall with the GOP primary candidates for U.S. Senate. Register here.

I wanted to start off with something about our priorities and directions. Last week, Kurt Schlicter posted his take, Political Moneyball: The Conservative Strategy for Winning the Fight Coming After the Election on the Big Government blog, on the short- and long-term goals of Tea Party Patriots. In particular, he distinguished between the Establishment GOP and conservatives of whatever stripe. Here are some extracts:

The GOP Establishment we keep hearing about is real, and it is also doomed.

That will not change whether the Establishment’s candidate Mitt Romney wins in November or not. After the election, the battle really starts; what is happening now are just skirmishes in a fight for control of the Republican Party. Not the soul of the party – if it had one, it auctioned it off long ago – but the mechanism of the party. The Grand Old Party matters only as a vehicle to carry our banner forward.

To do that, we need to seize control, and we do that by destroying the Establishment starting next November 7th.

Superficially, it might seem that we – the outsiders, the Tea Party, the conservatives, whatever the label – are outgunned by opponents with their hands on the reins of power, money in amounts we can’t hope to match, and pals in the media backing them. But if we understand our strengths, and our opponents’ weaknesses, we can not only compete but eventually prevail.

First, let’s understand our opponent.

The GOP Establishment is an amorphous entity composed of politicians, media types, consultants, writers, lobbyists, party hacks and donors whose first priority is protecting their positions and privileges. Power, and holding onto it, is more important than ideology. That’s where we conservatives differ – we have no formal power or position, so changing the power structure doesn’t scare us. We have nothing to lose; the GOP Establishment has everything to lose.

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The most important part of the Tea Party/conservatives’ rise since 2009 has not been its remarkably rapid rise to significance and its ability to affect marquee elections in 2010. That’s the short game, and while it matters, what matters more is that it drew huge numbers of conservatives into the political process.

The next generation of GOP leaders will be Tea Party/conservatives. They are the folks starting out now to compete for the kind of local and state party and political offices that lay the foundation for the party’s future. These offices are vital – they are our farm team, a place for future congressional and senate candidates to gain experience and build resumes while implementing Constitutional conservative policies right now that will improve voters’ lives and win them over to our cause.

More on the short game and the long game here.

Welcome again Cleveland 9.12 members!