Rachel Hoff is a young Republican activist based in Washington, D.C., and a good friend of the WYRF. Keli Carender is our WYRF chair. Here’s an article they wrote together following the Taxpayer March on Washington, D.C. last month which they both attended. This was originally published on September 18th, 2009 for AmericanMaggie.com. Thanks, Rachel and Keli, for allowing us to repost the article here.

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This weekend’s Taxpayer March on Washington was the culmination of a season of discontent. Beginning last year with the first bailout, things started to heat up with the spring and summer tea parties and really gained momentum in August with the town hall meetings around the country. Americans have been raising their voices in opposition of a government that wants to take over everything from banks to health care. On Saturday, they came to Washington.

We were there. And while there were some pretty entertaining signs this weekend, the most exciting part of the experience was meeting the people – the individuals who saved their money and gave up summer vacations to come to Washington by planes, trains, and automobiles. Politicians would do well to realize that the people marching on Saturday were from every corner of this nation, and they represent every kind of voter imaginable. There were conservatives, libertarians, independents, Republicans, Democrats, young, old, middle-aged, white, black, Asian, Hispanic, female, male, straight, gay, single, married, poor, rich, middle class, activists, teachers, miners, stay-at-home moms, bloggers, students, small business owners, and the list goes on. Most importantly, we are all Americans, we are all voters, and we are all tuning in.

The two of us writing this article signify one of the balancing acts that exists within this movement, representing two different elements of the conservative spectrum. One of us is a long-time Republican and the other is a political new-comer with conservative tendencies. We are from opposite sides of America – one of us lives in Washington DC; the other is from Washington State.

One of us has worked for campaigns, on Capitol Hill, and at DC think tanks; the other works for a nonprofit during the day, goes to improv comedy rehearsals at night, and organizes rallies on the weekends. We represent the DC establishment and the Seattle protester – and it takes both for a national grassroots political movement to truly succeed.

What do we have in common? We are both young women who marched from Freedom Plaza to the Capitol lawn this weekend to tell Congress and the President that we can do a better job of spending our own money and managing our healthcare than the federal government.

There are wildly divergent estimates of the size of the crowd. Over the weekend the MSM reported that there were numbers ranging from the “thousands,” a la the New York Times, to the more generous estimate of “tens of thousands” used by most other media outlets. Those estimates are completely at odds with some day-of reports that claimed attendance of over one million. Our guess at the time was between 250,000 and 500,000 marchers – most certainly in the hundreds of thousands. New aerial photographs recently released by Freedom Works are finally demonstrating the actual size of the rally.

But no matter how many people were present at the March, one thing is undeniable: The protesters who took to the streets of Washington and flooded Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the Capitol represent the views of millions upon millions of Americans across the country who stayed at home on Saturday and have profound concerns about the President’s plans for their health care.

With public opinion on healthcare deeply divided, with more Americans disapproving of Obama’s handling of health care policy than approving, with hundreds of thousands taking to the streets around the country in protest, it is almost humorous to watch the Democrat leaders in Washington flounder in response.

When David Axelrod says the anti-ObamaCare protestors are “not representative of the majority,” we say: Keep fooling yourself.

When Nancy Pelosi calls Americans who go to their Congressmen’s town hall meetings to express their views as “un-American,” we say: Keep digging your Party’s political grave.

Clearly, this moment in American political history provides a huge opportunity for the Republican Party to begin building a majority again – and the GOP can and should take advantage of it. But the biggest mistake the Republicans could make is to believe that any of what is going on right now is a result of the actions taken by the GOP. All of the fervor, all of the fury of this nationwide grassroots movement has been a negative reaction to proposals from President Obama and Democrats in Congress, not national excitement for Republican proposals. The signs at the March on Washington reflected this mood, with the popularity of negative statements – from the classic “Don’t Tread on Me” flags to the home-made “I am not your ATM” sign – rather than positive statements.

There is no natural link between this movement and support for the Republican Party – yet. Many activists at tea parties and town halls around the country were independents. Many protestors at the March in Washington were apolitical, never having attended a political rally before. The challenge of the GOP is to galvanize this national sentiment against this Administration and this Congress, translate it into a reason to support Republicans, and mobilize it into votes for our candidates at the polls in 2010 and 2012.

To this end, there is something truly hopeful in our personal experience at this weekend’s March. After having taken extraordinarily different paths in life, this weekend we found ourselves walking shoulder to shoulder down Pennsylvania Avenue armed with one, united message: a government big enough to give you everything you need is big enough to take everything you have, including your freedom. From one Washington to another, we hope the politicians listen.

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Keli Carender is a tea partier and founder of the activist network, the Seattle Sons & Daughters of Liberty. Rachel Hoff is a young Republican activist based in Washington, DC.

Rachel Hoff is a young Republican activist based in Washington, D.C., and a good friend of the WYRF. Here’s an article she wrote on September 28th, 2009 for Parcbench.com.  Thanks, Rachel, for allowing us to repost the article here.

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There’s a lot of talk these days about what the GOP can do to appeal to young voters. In the wake of Barack Obama’s 2-to-1 victory among voters under-30, the diagnosis seems to be that the Republican Party just isn’t “cool.” How can the GOP get our hip replacement? Everybody has their own answer… tweet more, redesign the RNC logo, move the Party to the center, take the Party back to true conservative principles – and the list goes on.

The simple truth is: there is no silver bullet solution to making the Republican Party “cool.” Sure, technology and branding and ideology are important, but they will not make or break a candidate or a Party’s ability to appeal to young people.

Unfortunately – or maybe, fortunately – winning our generation of voters is far more complex than having a great logo and running a candidate under the age of 50 who knows what Twitter is. (In fact, recent reports show the GOP may actually be better at Twitter, so it must be deeper than that.) If the Republican Party wants to win the hearts and minds of young voters, they must do three things: engage, empower, and deliver.

First, we have to engage young voters. Simply put, we have to ask. We need to show young Americans that we care about them and that we want their votes, despite what strategists will tell us about youth voter turnout, because we realize that our Party will be better just for having them in it. It’s the right thing to do, but it’s also about survival, because what we today refer to as “the youth vote” will soon be called simply “the American electorate.”

The next step is to empower. We cannot be the Party of top-down control and wait-your-turn politics. Instead, we should empower young people to make this Party their own. Frankly, the GOP doesn’t have a lot of other options right now. We hear all the time that we are a Party in the wilderness, searching for our next great leader. It’s time for us to stop complaining that the Republican Party needs a leader, and just be the leader the Republican Party needs.

As “hip” as Barack Obama may be, the real genius of his appeal to young people was not about him, it was about how he empowered them.

It was not simply about him as a leader, but that he empowered them to be leaders.

He told them, “Yes We Can.”

When we talk about new technologies, it’s on one level just about reaching young people where they are – online. But it’s also about empowerment. The power of Twitter is that it gives any individual with a computer, BlackBerry, or iPhone the ability to be a news breaker and a commentator.

But it’s not just about new media. The GOP needs old fashioned social networking – people sitting down with people over coffee or a beer sharing their own personal stories about why they are a Republican – to succeed. We need everyday “cool” young people to be willing to come out of the conservative closet. The rebirth of the Republican Party can happen at happy hours after work and in dining halls on college campuses around the country. But only if we speak up.

Finally, we must deliver. We have to be who we say we’re going to be. For whatever Barack Obama was or was not during the Presidential campaign, one thing was for sure – he was distinctly himself.

It is this kind of authenticity that young people crave. Young Americans are hungry for a party or a candidate that puts principle over politics. They thought they found that in Barack Obama. But who he was during the campaign and who he is as President have turned out to be two very different things. The candidate who promised to reach out to all Americans is now the President who’s doing politics as usual. During the campaign, Obama appeared to be authentic, but now it’s not so clear.

This has opened up a huge door for the GOP. Obama’s approval ratings fell among Americans of all ages this summer, but they dropped most dramatically among young voters. (According to Gallup, he fell 11 points from July to August among 18-29 year olds.) To take advantage of this opportunity, Republicans need to engage young Americans, empower them to lead, and deliver on our promises. Tweeting and going on late night talk shows may help, but to be cool to the core is much more complex. The good news is: the Democrats don’t really seem to have it figured out either.