The 2008 elections would prove to be the impetus Joe Citizen needed to begin moving him into action.
John McCain had not been well received by conservatives as the one who would faithfully represent their views and interests in Washington.
McCain certainly had the war hero's history to his credit, which Joe loved.
But he also had built a reputation as a politician who was too willing to sacrifice conservative principle in the interest of passing legislation he liked, campaign finance reform being the most recent example.
When McCain abruptly halted his presidential campaign to go to Washington because of the erupting financial mess, Joe was hoping he would be the maverick he touted himself to be and stand up against the likely Washington bailout.
He did not! To Joe, this was confirmation that John McCain was nothing more than what many Republican politicians had become, Democrat lite! Sarah Palin was a different story! She had not worked her way through the usual political channels to arrive at her position in life.
She had actually gone up against them.
She was just like Joe in many ways.
She understood him, she spoke his language, she deeply moved him on the inside.
She also personified the repeated hypocrisy of the women's movement in NOW.
Joe believed that when NOW says it seeks to advance the cause of women, what they actually mean is liberal women.
If a conservative woman is placed alongside a liberal male, now will endorse the liberal male every time.
Just another example of "no truth in advertising!" While McCain's decision to throw his support behind the looming government bailout may have been the one single most thing which cost him victory in November, Sarah Palin was definitely the single most factor which kept it from being a total wipe out! Without her, his defeat might have been worse than Mondale's in 1984.
Joe Citizen was not fooled by Barak Obama's rhetoric during the campaign.
Joe sized his character up from previous associations, actions, and voting record.
He found that it was different from the things Obama said.
Some of Joe's friends were taken in by the smooth speaking and voted for Obama.
Some of them simply sat the election out.
Obama very quickly affirmed Joe's opinion of his character once elected.
The first substantial indicator for Joe was the massive spending the president engineered and pushed through Congress.
The amount of deficit spending, which would become actual debt at some point, was simply too large to reasonably expect the American public to be able to repay.
Debt kept being added to the nation's responsibility so quickly and in such large amounts that Joe knew the government under Obama's leadership was out of control.
Joe began thinking he would need to personally do something to stop this - nobody in government was going to do so.
Closely aligned with the massive accumulation of debt was what Joe perceived as the nationalization of industry and the American product.
In communist countries and dictatorships, businesses are simply seized "in the interests of the people.
" No seizing took place in the United States; Obama used the government's purse to gain control.
The end result was the same, of course! We had government ownership of and control of businesses.
It was done under the "too big to fail" guise.
We now had the American government deciding that some businesses were so important to our economy that the government must step in to prop them up.
Of course, with this aid also came control; and, unfair advantage for the seized business over those which were not "seized.
" All of this was happening so quickly that Joe almost didn't realize it was socialism in action.
But he did recognize it and he began to resolve that he would not allow it to succeed.
Another factor moving Joe into Tea Party activity was the way the Democrats chose to operate - completely unilaterally.
Republicans were totally shut out of the process because the Democrats had a large enough numerical advantage to be able to do so.
Republicans could not attend conferences, were not allowed substantial amendments, were not included in the legislative writing process, were not permitted review of proposed legislation.
Joe knew a power grab when he saw it.
President Obama repeatedly said that he wanted bipartisan legislation.
His idea of bipartisan was somewhat different from Joe's, however.
Obama's idea of bipartisan was for Republicans to simply accept Democrat proposals unchanged.
Absent that, if one Republican signed onto legislation, Obama deemed it bipartisan.
How foolish did he think Joe Citizen was? Another central character to all which was happening was Glenn Beck.
Originally a comedian of sorts, Beck began to notice the people Obama was placing in his leadership structure.
These were not cabinet people, but advisors to the president, known as czars.
Some of them had Marxist associations in their past, or used Marxist rhetoric at speaking events.
It would be logical to assume that these people had Marxist leanings at the least, or were outright Marxists at the worst.
Beck began to expose who they were which, of course, created a firestorm.
He also began to put the pieces into a puzzle and the resulting picture was of an administration systematically dismantling capitalism and putting in place the machinery for socialism.
But this was not all.
Two more events, both finding their way into the courts, would add to the rage Joe citizen felt: Arizona and Obamacare!