By DAVID BARSTOW
c.2010 New York Times News Service
SANDPOINT, Idaho – Pam Stout has not always lived in fear of her government. She remembers her years working in federal housing programs in California, when she saw government, however imperfect, lift struggling families with job training and educational assistance. She beams at the memory of helping a Vietnamese woman get into junior college.
But all that was before the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, before Barack Obama took the White House by promising sweeping change on multiple fronts, before her son lost his job and his house. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated – even manufactured – by both parties to grab power.
She was new to protest politics – happily retired, she had never made a political donation in her life. Last April, she went to her first Tea Party rally, then to a meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party Patriots. She did not know a soul, yet when they began electing board members, she stood up, swallowed hard, and nominated herself for president. “I was like, ‘Did I really just do that?’ ” she recalled.