Keli Carender takes Tea Party's mixed messages to the streets

IF THE TEA Party movement is about the rage of the pitch-fork-wielding masses toward a government run amok, then Keli Carender is its most unlikely heroine.

She's 30, fresh-faced, Oxford educated and about as Seattle as you can get in her slacker wardrobe of plaid duds and Converse All Stars.

Like the brainy girl in the front row of civics class who rolls her eyes every time the teacher gets a date wrong, there's a little snarkiness in her disposition, perhaps a tick learned on her night job as an improv comedian.

But as a leader in a movement full of people who only see dark clouds over America's horizon, Carender manages to be pleasantly partly-sunny, her hopes set firmly on shaking up the November midterm Congressional elections.

Sure, she's serious when she says President Obama espouses socialist policies. Yes, she cried on the day of his inauguration. And, true, she organized the very first protest against government spending at Seattle's Westlake Park in February 2009, before there was even such a thing as a national "Tea Party movement."

Like the crusade she helped start, though, Carender defies easy categories. She's a free-market, DIY capitalist who teaches math and resume writing by day. She's spent the last year encouraging everyday people to vent their raw anger over government expansion and the national debt, but spends free time composing feisty, bookish entries under the nom de blog Liberty Belle for her website, redistributingknowledge.blogspot.com.

When she introduces herself to readers this way on the blog, "I am a girl who loves to read; loves politics; loves her country; fiercely supports the men and women in the armed forces; loves her family; is engaged to be married to the most wonderful, sweet and thoughtful man (yippeee!)," you don't know whether to wince at the preciousness or thank goodness for an unabashed expression of humanity in an age of targeted sound bites.

In a rigid "either/or" world, Carender is a "both/and" kind of person.

Her rise to prominence from the bastion of liberalism that is Seattle to the vanguard of a movement dominated by rugged individualists and champions of limited government speaks to a complicated phenomenon, a weird brew of economic upheaval and political betrayal that has pushed normally quiet Americans onto the picket lines.

WERE IT NOT for the Tea Party movement, the only way you'd get a sense of Carender's politics would be to gaze around the tiny Seattle apartment she shares with fiance Conor McNassar, a fellow comedian. A poster from the Reagan Ranch that says "I love capitalism" greets visitors at the door. "Work harder: Millions on welfare depend on you!" goes a bumper sticker on the back of her laptop.

As she un-ironically sips a cup of hot tea at McCoy's Firehouse Bar and Grill in Pioneer Square, she describes her breaking point. Or rather, points.

It all started with the Wall Street meltdown in the fall of 2008 and the Bush administration's bailout of threatened financial firms.

"For a second, I thought maybe, 'You're as dumb as everybody says,' " Carender remembers grumbling upon hearing Bush say in December of that year that he had "abandoned free-market principles to save the free-market system."

The feeling of ideological whiplash made her want to cry, she says.

She'd gone from growing up in a centrist Democratic household in a "cruddy little rental house" on Mercer Island to living a closet-conservative life in progressive Seattle. "Trash talk" about Bush, whom she supported, was common in her social and work circles. She always turned the other cheek.

On the day after Obama won, Carender's colleagues cheered while she brooded.

"It was probably because it was the first election I cared about, really," she says, explaining her state at the time.

Later, on Inauguration Day, she got on the phone with her two sisters, who are also politically conservative, and finally shed tears.

"For a long time I just sat quietly because I thought I would lose friends and be ostracized," Carender says, suddenly turning defiant. "It was just me being ashamed of what I believed in, but that's ridiculous.

"For eight years there was such vitriol for George Bush, and now I'm being told to let that go and stay above the fray . . . The frustrated part of me wanted to lash out. I said, 'Do I take the high ground?' When you've taken something for so long, you want people to understand how hurtful it was."

Carender seemed suited for the limelight at an early age. At home, she was the family jokester. She took an interest in theater as a little girl.

With a dad who served as a Democratic precinct officer on Mercer Island, she was no stranger to politics. Back when the family lived in Denver in the 1980s, she was so fascinated by former Democratic presidential candidate Jesse Jackson that her dad, also a fan, took her out of school one day to attend an event where he was speaking.

Carender wasn't new to political upheaval, either. Her dad broke with the Democrats in large part because of what he saw as the party's increasingly vocal support of abortion rights, which he opposes.

Until 2008, though, Carender hadn't really acted on any political inclinations.

Her activism first came in dribs and drabs. She'd post "mild articles" on her Facebook page disputing liberal ideas.

In the lead-up to last year's vote on the Obama administration's stimulus package, Carender says she tried numerous times to call Washington state Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell to voice her opinions about the "1,000 pages of gobbledygook" and pork-barrel spending she saw in the bill. Instead, she was greeted with voice messages saying the senators' in boxes were full.

"For the three days leading up to the vote," she says, "you couldn't even get through. It really felt like, 'Ugh! They don't care.' That's what finally drove me to do something.

"I felt like they were giving us the middle finger."

Upset about this seeming lack of transparency and access, Carender gave them the middle finger right back. On Feb. 16, the day before Obama signed the $787 billion stimulus bill, she staged her hastily arranged "Porkulus" protest after putting the word out on conservative talk radio.

Her description of doing comedy at Jet City Improv, where she's a regular, sounds a lot like the unwieldy nature of grass-roots organizing. "It's a shoot-from-the-hip sort of thing," she says.

More than 100 people showed up to the protest, much to her surprise. Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin donated trays of pulled pork to use as props. Carender thought she was onto something.

"A small part of me was like, 'Next time, it's going to be bigger.' "

She couldn't have known how big.

But more than a year later, the movement remains amorphous, lacking an ideological core. It feels like less a crusade of ideas than a collective outpouring of emotion, a political reaction that is visceral in its intensity, frustrating in the hodgepodge of impulses it represents.

Under the massive Tea Party umbrella you have libertarian types like Carender, independents, conservatives and right-wing conspiracy theorists, fans of tax relief and foes of abortion. Bailouts for corporations are as unpopular as concepts like "social justice." It's a mob of grievances and anxieties in search of someone to hold accountable.

"It's a perennial theme in American politics: The people versus the politicians," says University of Washington assistant history professor Margaret O'Mara, who notes similar convulsions in the 1880s and the 1930s, both periods of massive, hard-to-fathom economic and social upheavals. "It taps into something that runs deep in our culture, and it's not going away."

The logic of railing against government meddling when stricter policing of financial firms might have prevented the mortgage crisis, for example, gets a little tricky. But like Carender trying in vain to reach her elected representatives, demonstrators just want to be heard.

CARENDER IS quoted in a February New Yorker article on the Tea Party movement as saying that she's borrowing from the left's protest playbook by being "loud, obnoxious and in their faces."

But a recent rally outside Seattle's Northgate Mall, held to celebrate the one-year anniversary of Carender's first protest, is pretty tame.

In contrast to depictions of President Obama as Hitler and other provocative caricatures that have cropped up at Tea Party events across the nation, the signs protesters bring display a distinctly Northwest palette of muted frustrations.

One man's sign, standing about 6 feet long, contains nothing but a list of taxes in alphabetical order: "Oil spill tax, petroleum products tax, public utility tax, real estate tax, refuse tax, RTA, rental car tax, solid fuel burning device tax, special hotel/motel tax, syrup tax, timber tax, tire fee."

Matthew Wenger, a 20-year-old from Lynnwood who says he just got a job at an appliance store after being out of work six months, holds a sign that reads: "My Two-Year-Old Is Already in Debt."

Standing in the damp cold with only a T-shirt to keep him warm, Wenger says he started attending Tea Party rallies in February last year after Obama signed the economic stimulus bill.

He previously worked at a logging company that was heavily dependent on the construction industry, which tanked in the housing bust. His wife, Rachel, is pregnant with their second child.

Wenger says it's wrong to burden the next generation with massive new government spending on the stimulus and health-care-reform bills.

What was merely a frustrating fiscal irresponsibility under Bush has become intolerable under Obama, Wenger says. With high unemployment and exploding government debt, the stakes are higher now.

The fear of financial doom is almost palpable among the protesters.

"I'm 90. Please DON'T TAX ME TO DEATH!" reads Jack Steidl's sign.

The demonstrator from Issaquah toots a brass horn at cars as they pass by, to stir up a little excitement on the picket line.

"When I was growing up in the '30s, a million dollars was incomprehensible," Steidl says. "But now, you know, we're talking about trillions of dollars. From everything I understand, there's no way we'll ever be able to pay that off. We're going to go bankrupt."

John Lee of Port Orchard drove up from Kitsap County with his wife and friends just to attend the Northgate rally.

"We thought, hey, you know, we gotta do something," says Lee, a businessman who used to be a Democrat but now leans Republican. "We're just tired of sitting around. We feel powerless anymore."

Soon it becomes clear that the Tea Party movement isn't just a forum for latent activists to transfer the armchair polemics of the living room to the street corner. It's a way of validating impulses usually kept simmering behind closed doors, finding common cause in the light of day.

Maybe the guy or girl next door's been tuning into Fox News, too.

"Have you been watching Glenn Beck at all?" Lee asks. "He thinks if we can somehow cut expenses in our country, like taxes, 50 percent, it would really stimulate our economy and kick things into gear. Yeah, we'd have tough times. We'd have to pay back our debt and whatnot. But we could bring back days like they used to be, where people paid for their own stuff and people helped one another instead of government doing everything."

Let's make things the way they used to be. You can hear echoes of this Tea Party rallying cry in the voice of Bonnie Donovan, a 69-year-old from Seattle who helps Steidl hold his sign when his knees start acting up.

"I'm tired of them taking money from people that earn it and giving it to people that don't earn it," Donovan says, referring to health-care reform.

She doesn't specify who these non-earners are. The populism of the Tea Party movement makes targets of strange bedfellows, from welfare recipients to Wall Street titans. The one universal enemy, however, is Big Brother.

Carender's uneasy about all the media attention focused on her, especially given the barrage of hate mail she has received for her views, including accusations of racism and wishes for her demise. At the rally, she avoids the limelight, opting instead to record video clips of other protesters declaring on camera, "I am the Tea Party leader." The point is to show that the movement is not an "Astroturf" spectacle orchestrated from on high by moneyed interests.

Jackie Dunbar, a protester from Mercer Island, sees promising leadership qualities in Carender, though.

"She's a brilliant young woman," Dunbar says. "She has a tremendous sense of what it means to be a citizen."

Carender deflects any such praise.

"We're just people trying to affect the direction of the country because we think our direction is the better way," she says.

"The difference between maybe a leftist group and our group is we are very much individualist," she says. "It is a little bit harder to get a unified message."

Their hope is that the late historian Richard Hofstadter's dictum, "Third parties are like bees: Once they have stung, they die," will prove untrue of this movement.

So far, says O'Mara, "It's certainly doing a good job of stinging."

Tyrone Beason is a Pacific Northwest magazine staff writer. Cliff DesPeaux is a Seattle Times staff photographer.