Tea parties reveal Left’s quick descent to hubris
By: Chris Stirewalt
Political Editor
April 13, 2009
It hasn’t taken long for Democrats to succumb to the same arrogance that helped tank Republicans last year.
Just as conservatives once mocked the online wave that helped Barack Obama surf into the White House, liberals are now heaping scorn on the tea party movement. This Web phenomenon may bring tens of thousands of small-government conservatives to tax day rallies across the country Wednesday. They Twitter. They Facebook. They blog. They mail tea bags to Congress.
It’s an outgrowth of the tax-revolt movement that has been simmering on the libertarian right for years. But the idea got new life as conservatives, upset at the scope of the Obama agenda, passed around online a clip of CNBC personality Rick Santelli railing against the president’s mortgage bailout.
In a televised rant Feb. 19, Santelli said he and some Chicago bond traders were going to throw devalued mortgage-backed securities into Lake Michigan in the spirit of Sam Adams and the Sons of Liberty in 1773.
His call to arms gained traction the next day when White House press secretary Robert Gibbs gave Santelli an official tongue-lashing.
At first, there were some spontaneous rallies. But conservative webheads agreed that April 15 would be the best time to make a show of strength against socialism. Within a month, there were thousands of bloggers hyping the rallies and tea party events scheduled for every state.
Eric Odom, the administrator of TaxDay TeaParty.com, is organizing the event in Chicago and helping coordinate the national effort. He expects almost 600 rallies around the country with as many as 10,000 attendees at the events in Atlanta and San Antonio. CNBC and Santelli backed away from the idea, but top-rated Fox News jumped in and has been trumpeting the tea party movement for weeks. And it all happened without any traditional political organization.
Odom says he turned down an offer from Republican National Convention Chairman Michael Steele to speak in Chicago. Steele’s office denies the offer was made, but Odom says it happened and was adamant about why he said no.
“This isn’t about either party,” he said. “This is about Middle America being ready to come together and say to both parties: ‘Enough is enough.’ ”
Despite the apparent success of the tea partiers, the erstwhile political insurgents of the Left are blowing the whole thing off as either fake or crazy.
Rachel Maddow, who is now the top weeknight TV talker on MSNBC, devoted a seven-minute segment last week to mocking the protesters with dirty jokes about the slang use of the word “teabag” for a variation of oral sex.
Maddow joked that Republicans were lining up to get in on the “hot tea-bagging action.” At the DailyKos.com, which was one of the original engines of the Internet-based success of Democrats, the double entendre and derision are even stronger.
“So build your papier-mâché tea bags, wingers! We can never laugh enough at your expense,” wrote site founder Markos Moulitsas in a Friday blog post deriding the tea partiers as stupid and incapable of delivering the kind of political punch he and his cohorts can.
But it is usually the way of those in power to dismiss the ungainly first steps of a potential challenger. The Democratic establishment had no respect for the emergence of conservative talk radio and The Drudge Report in the early to mid-1990s. “Small time,” they said. When Hillary Clinton defended her husband in 1998, though, the movement had grown into a “vast, right-wing conspiracy.”
Frustrated liberals answered with MoveOn.org and other Web sites, as well as their own failed foray into talk radio, Air America.
At the time, Republicans laughed off the Left side of the Web as a bunch of anti-war kooks who couldn’t match the GOP’s ground game or fundraising. Then Obama used the Internet to build an unprecedented war chest and supporter database, and Republicans were laughing no more.
Now, Air America host Al Franken likely will soon be a senator, and his colleague Maddow is getting big bucks for telling a schoolgirl’s dirty jokes on TV. Along with Moulitsas, MoveOn and others, they now make up the dominant political culture.
The still-inchoate tea party effort is building connections on the Right and helping conservatives learn how to use the networking technologies that Democrats have dominated. It’s giving them something to Twitter about.
How will that play out in 2010 or 2012? If Democrats write them off, the new sons and daughters of liberty may be instant-messaging their way into power.
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