The man behind the Cincinnati Tea Party
By Howard Wilkinson
Six weeks ago, Mike Wilson was just a regular guy, sitting at his kitchen table in Springfield Township steaming over taxes and fuming over government bailouts and stimulus packages.
Today, much to his own surprise, he finds himself at the head of a political movement in Cincinnati, capable of mobilizing an army of thousands of anti-tax, anti-spending conservatives to put pressure on politicians from city hall to Congress.
And it was all because the Fountain Square rally Wilson and some like-minded conservatives organized for March 15 - billed as the "Cincinnati Tea Party" - drew the kind of crowd heretofore reserved for presidential campaign rallies and World Series victory celebrations.
"I have to say that I was surprised at how big it became," the 32-year-old Internet technology consultant said of the crowd of 5,000 who showed up on Fountain Square March 15. "It was enormous."
When Wilson, a self-described political novice, went in February to apply for an event permit from Fountain Square Management Group, the form asked how many people were expected to attend. He wrote "250," guessing that was about as many as he could reach.
"I had to keep going back and revising the permit," Wilson said. "It just kept growing."
It started with a kitchen-table conservation with his wife, Joni. The burden of taxes on a family like theirs - two working parents, three children - was becoming too much to bear.
"We even talked about my wife maybe quitting her job to put us in a better position when it came to taxes," Wilson said. "We didn't do it; she's still working. But the fact that we were even talking about such a thing was pretty amazing."
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