How to explain the contrast, highlighted in yesterday’s Examiner editorial, between the big turnout for tea parties around the country today and the pathetically low turnout at the “New Way Forward” rallies organized by backers of Obama administration policies? The left has been attempting to write off the tea parties as “astroturf” promoted by right-wing organizations and Fox News. But, as Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) explains in the Wall Street Journal, that explanation just doesn’t cut it. As Reynolds, who’s been keeping in touch with tea party organizers since February, explains, the tea parties ( here’s a Google map, which shows how widespread they are, and here is Rob Neppell’s tea party blog aggregator ) have been organized primarily by ordinary people out there and national organizations have been following in their wake. And there’s plenty of organizational muscle on the left. But it’s not producing much in the way of warm bodies on the street.
That’s a vivid contrast from the 2008 campaign cycle, in which the Obama campaign out-organized every other campaign and drew a spontaneous enthusiasm of support which neither the Clinton campaign nor any of the Republican campaigns could match. The balance of enthusiasm favored the left then. Now it favors the right—although I’m not sure all the tea party participants would describe themselves as being on the right.
One plausible reason for the change in the balance of enthusiasm is that in general the outs demonstrate and the ins stay home. Obama backers wanted to get rid of George W. Bush and to install a president that suited their image of what America should be. Once they did so, there’s no need to go out on a rainy day. Whereas the tea party demonstrators didn’t really have a cause in 2008; many say they were disgusted with George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress and there was so little enthusiasm for John McCain that he took to campaigning with his running mate Sarah Palin once it became apparent she could draw big crowds.
But it’s not always true that the outs have more enthusiasm. In the 2004 election Republican turnout efforts proved more successful than Democratic turnout efforts, even though Bush was the incumbent and Republicans held majorities in Congress.
What’s going on here, I think, is that Obama backers were motivated by the person they were backing while the tea party folks are motivated by the policies they’re opposing. People didn’t construct MyObama webpages, my hypothesis goes, because they wanted higher taxes on high earners or more government spending; they did so because they wanted (in the phrase used in Howard Dean’s 2003-04 campaign) to “take your country back,” to put into the presidency a person whose character and values they admired in place of a president whose character and values they loathed. The tea party protesters, on the other hand, don’t seem to care much one way or the other about the persona of the president. They object, in varying degrees of coherence, to what they see as his policies.
It’s not at all clear that the Republican party or Republican candidates can mobilize the enthusiasm apparent in the tea parties. Many of their organizers insist that they are nonpartisan, stress that they don’t like Republicans very much; some have barred Republican officeholders and Republican National Chairman Michael Steele from speaking at their rallies. What the tea parties do seem to show is that the Obama economic policies (and in some respect, they are continuations or extensions of Bush policies: see the GM and Chrysler bailouts) have a lot more enthusiastic detrators than they do enthusiastic backers. Something to keep in mind in the months ahead.
