Post-Soviet Russia invented something called a "technical" party, which is a dummy rival party established by a stronger party (often the ruling party) to siphon off votes from rival parties, and/or uphold the appearance of democratic competition. This NYT story is about one woman in Siberia from a technical party who went rogue. Not in a Palin way, but in a real way. She wanted her technical party to be a real opposition. And Putin's ruling party, United Russia, reacted fiercely to her impudence. Somewhat similarly, we have in the U.S. today a technical party called the Tea Party, which was established and funded by Republicans like Dick Armey and the Koch brothers to create the appearance of dissent/competition in the GOP ranks and to distract conservatives from the fact that their party supported the Wall Street bailouts, which the rank-and-file opposed. Time will tell if this technical party will rise up against its master, the GOP, and seek to become a real alternative. But signs so far are not encouraging. So far it looks like this tactic straight out of Vladimir Putin's playbook has worked as intended: it got the GOP re-elected.
I made it clear months ago that Tea Partiers were just Republicans playing dress-up and trying to re-brand themselves, but here is a major media blogger agreeing with me, citing polling evidence that is obvious to anybody who has actually interacted with teabaggers, who are the same Republicans they've always known.
But don't forget about my theory on why the Tea Party was astroturfed into existence in the first place: to distract Republicans from realizing that real financial and banking reform were necessary, and instead to convince them to blame the intended cure (fiscal stimulus) for causing the disease (risky lending, big banks' toxic debt, and the Wall Street-engineered bi-partisan bailouts).
(I think I stole my theory from somebody else but I can't remember from whom.)
Is the "tea party" just a wing of the Republican party? AP Photo
The scads of media coverage about the burgeoning "tea party" effort has focused heavily on the idea that those who identify themselves as part of the movement are political free agents -- dismissive of both parties and Washington in general.
New data out of Gallup suggests that premise isn't right, as nearly seven in 10 tea party supporters describe themselves as "conservative Republicans."
All told, nearly 80 percent of tea party supporters describe themselves as Republicans, while 15 percent say they are Democrats and just six percent are, in their own minds, "pure independents."
The numbers between tea party supporters and conservative Republicans also track closely on other measures, including the image ratings of President Obama. Fifteen percent of tea party backers have a favorable view of the president, while 11 percent of conservative Republicans say the same. Those numbers are strikingly dissimilar from the poll of all Americans -- 53 percent of whom view Obama favorably.
Asked whether they would support a generic Republican or a generic Democrat for Congress this fall, 80 percent of tea party supporters chose the GOP candidate, while 15 percent opted for the Democrat. While the loyalty of tea party supporters to Republican candidates is lower than that of self-identified "conservative Republicans" -- 95 percent of whom back the GOP candidate in the generic ballot -- it is still heavily weighted toward candidates of a certain ideological proclivity.
"Their similar ideological makeup and views suggest that the Tea Party movement is more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene," Gallup Poll director Frank Newport wrote in an analysis of the results, which were culled from national surveys conducted in March, May and June.
The Gallup findings generally affirm findings by Resurgent Republic, a conglomerate of GOP polling firms, in five states over the past weeks.
"This is a group that is organically more Republican," said GOP pollster Glen Bolger, who conducted several focus groups of tea party backers. "They have turned the page on Obama."
The Gallup data, when combined with the Resurgent Republic findings, suggests that the constant comparisons between today's tea party voter and the supporters of Ross Perot in the early 1990s are simply wrong.
The Post's Dan Balz debunked that comparison several months ago. Wrote Balz:
"The Perot voters were a disparate group, ideologically diverse, with generally secular views. The tea party movement is far more cohesive. If anything, it is simply an adjunct of the conservative wing of the Republican Party, even if many of its supporters say they hold no particular allegiance for the GOP and are critical of party leadership."
That final point is the most important one when it comes to assessing the tea party's influence in the midterm elections. As victories by Rand Paul in Kentucky and Sharron Angle in Nevada show, the tea party crowd doesn't take its marching orders from the national Republican leadership.
But, in the fall campaign, when faced with a choice not between two Republicans but between a Republican and a Democrat, the Gallup data seem to suggest that the tea party crowd will opt for the GOP candidates in large numbers.
Why? Because they are, at heart, Republicans -- only by a different name at the moment. Or, as, Newport puts it: "Republican leaders who worry about the Tea Party's impact on their races may in fact (and more simply) be defined as largely worrying about their party's core base."
A small piece hit CNN's blog today stating that the National Tea Party Unity convention was moving from its set date of July 15-17 to October 2010. The reasons given by the organizing committee include:
"it would more advantageous to hold the convention in the middle of October just prior to the November elections."
"The heat in Las Vegas in July is keeping many who would like to participate from attending."
"We have also received numerous emails from people who were forced to decide between family vacations and attending the convention."
CNN's piece basically served as publication of their statement without applying any critical analysis to it. There are some basic questions you should be asking here that don't even require you to be a veteran event organizer.
To make the point bluntly their stated reasons for moving the convention are bullshit, and CNN buried the real reason this is happening in the story which was "moving back the date allows other Tea Party groups to attend the convention." In other words they're two weeks from their event and they've got no attendees and no interest in it.
This should be a juicy media story about the staying power of the Tea Party movement. Are they going to keep it going or does the excitement fizzle out at some point? That's pretty much the first question I'd be asking if I were a reporter covering the Tea Party and this crossed my desk.
But just to drive my point home let me talk a little bit about what would be involved moving an event like this. It'd be a Herculean task that you wouldn't try simply because you wanted to influence the elections or deal with some attendees complaining about the Vegas heat (when they'd likely rarely leave the hotel anyway). The only reason you'd take this sort of extraordinary action two weeks out is if your event was in imminent danger of completely failing due to lack of attendance and media attention.
[...]
I've thought for a while that most of this Tea Party stuff was nothing more than puffed up astroturf and this pretty much proves it. Without conservative donors spending $100,000 to get Sarah Palin to attend or Fox News dedicating tens of hours of coverage to promote events you're not left with a whole lot. There's no real movement there, no real organizing being done.
That's the story we should be hearing in the media, but you're not going to hear it. At least not for a little while longer. But the boomlet of the Tea Party is on its way out, it's just a matter of time before that becomes conventional wisdom.
While all you naive conservatives are out there following the corrupt money trail of academic research grants to poor scientists, let me remind you where the REAL money is at: being a callous, war-mongering, profit-maximizing, burn-the-Earth, right-wing SOB. If you're willing to sell your soul for that, you'll always have a cushy well-paid job.
The Billionaires Behind the Hate By Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid Jilani, Lee Fang, and Alex Seitz-Wald December 8, 2009 | Think Progress
CORRECTION: The Tea Party rally was last Saturday, not Sunday. The ABC online article must have been updated Sunday, but they failed to update the text of the article saying "... today."
So, while we don't have evidence here of the lib'rul media at work, we do see evidence of a lazy, incompetent MSM.
My original joke still stands though, in fact, it's even jokier: since the rally was on a Saturday, the organizers had no excuse whatsoever for not attracting more attendees, not even church.
BTW, here's a photo of what several million people on the Washington Mall really look like:
Not even Al Sharpton could have inflated a protest crowd's size by 16-24 times and hoped to get away with it! These teabaggers (or at least their corporate controllers) have big brass ones, I'll give 'em that.
By the way, 60,000 to 70,000 patriots was the most that Dick Armey and FreedomWorks could summon, when our very freedom, our very capitalist system is at stake!? What gives?? It was a Sunday, so that typical reply, "Conservatives have jobs, they don't have time to protest" won't work this time. ... Oh, wait, they had to go to church, I forgot! Well, the Lord does come first. (Breakfast at Denny's comes second, and NFL comes third. But then comes teabagging!)
ABC News Reported D.C. Rally Size in Tens of Thousands, Not 1M to 1.5M as Activist Said.
September 13, 2009 ABC News
Conservative activists, who organized a march on the U.S. Capitol today in protest of the Obama administration's health care agenda and government spending, erroneously attributed reports on the size of the crowds to ABC News.
Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, the group that organized the event, said on stage at the rally Saturday that ABC News was reporting that 1 million to 1.5 million people were in attendance.
At no time did ABC News, or its affiliates, report a number anywhere near as large. ABCNews.com reported an approximate figure of 60,000 to 70,000 protesters, attributed to the Washington, D.C., fire department. In its reports, ABC News Radio described the crowd as "tens of thousands."
Brendan Steinhauser, spokesman for FreedomWorks, said he did not know why Kibbe cited ABC News as a source.
As a result of Kibbe's erroneous attribution, several bloggers and commenters repeated the misinformation.
In his blog, Kibbe apologized Sunday for the mistaken attribution of the crowd-size estimated to ABC News.
"With a dead IPhone, I had been shown tweets from a number of different folks behind the stage citing the ABC estimate," he wrote. "They didn't say it. I regret misrepresenting the network, as their coverage that day was fair and honest."
I'm actually starting to feel sorry for conservatives. They've never made much sense, but the trouncing they took in November appears to have driven them completely insane.
I can't think of a better word to describe people who meet up to protest taxes when taxes have not been raised, or who actually accuse the president who ended torture of being a fascist.
It seems fairly obvious, but if taxes and deficits were the issue, these same people would have been out in the streets for years now. The real issues, the true motives behind these paltry protests, are fairly simple: They lost, and there's a black guy with a foreign-sounding name in the White House. Does anyone think a bunch of old white people would be out in the street shouting crazy shit about fascism if Hillary Clinton was president? Not a chance. They'd be mad, but not insane.
What evidence is there that Obama's a fascist? So far, it seems that his insistence on the resignation of GM CEO Rick Wagoner is pretty much it. There is carping that he is asserting "unconstrained control" of the economy, but this is hogwash. He is, of course, totally constrained by congress; they just want to give him what he wants at the moment, much like the Delay congress did for Bush. Primarily, it seems, it is Obama's very charisma that right-wingers see as a sign of fascism. That is, of course, totally ridiculous. A charismatic leader is not a requirement of fascism, only that a leader be in total control and willing to use force to suppress his political opposition, neither condition being met by Obama. But to the Right, the very fact of Obama's popularity is proof enough that he is a black Hitler.
Just look at the signs in those ubiquitous pictures of the ludicrously over-hyped "tea parties" on tax day."Obama's plan: white slavery." "Barack Hussein Obama: The new face of Hitler." And my personal favorite, "The American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's ovens."
It would be bad enough if this were the worst of it, but there is much more. We've all heard the crazed, baseless conspiracy theories about Obama's birth certificate, the flatly idiotic notions of his plans to impose Islamic law, the accusations of "radical Marxism." But the hits just keep on coming. Recently, Alan Keyes, fast becoming the most ridiculous man in America, asserted that Obama would stage terrorist acts as a pretext for declaring martial law and cancelling future elections.
It's hard to gauge just how many people really believe this crazy crap, but it's obviously not enough to hurt Obama's approval ratings, which is just driving the right even crazier. Glenn Beck, for instance, appears to be having a nervous breakdown on live TV, to the entertainment of millions.
Beck, the new model of faux populist outrage, is really something to behold. There's an element of danger to his performances that you just don't see in the typical right wing ideologue. Hannity is Hannity every day—he's not going to have a fit or burst into tears on camera, not ever. Beck, on the other hand, is doing some kind of schizophrenic high wire act, descending further into madness with each broadcast.
If you want to understand real fascism, check out his new website, the912project.com, which "is designed to bring us back to the place we were on September 12th, 2001." Think about that for a second. Glenn Beck and his ilk think America was at its best on the day we were the most frightened, traumatized, and bewildered in recent history. I remember 9/12/01. People who had always seemed reasonable to me were bellowing about leaving glass craters in the desert. It was the most bloodthirsty, irrational, and easily led that this nation has been in my life, and Beck thinks that's exactly where we need to be. This is because Glenn Beck is a real fascist. He wants the American people scared shitless, willing to submit to any violation of their rights, begging for a strongman to protect them from the evil other. Charisma's got nothing to do with it.
Of course, there has always been a crazy left, too. The difference is that they never got the kind of media attention that these teabagging faux populists have. There were truly grassroots demonstrations against the Iraq invasion, involving not hundreds, but hundreds of thousands.But they never received even a hundredth of the press coverage these ridiculous tea parties did.In fact, they were ignored as much as possible, to the point of implausibility.
The highest estimate I've seen for tea party turnout, the one cited by Michelle Malkin and other conservative ideologues with an obvious desire to inflate the numbers as much as possible, is 250,000 nationwide, at 800 events. First of all, that makes for an average of 312 people per event. Second, 250,000 people is fewer than showed up at a single anti-war rally in DC before the Iraq invasion, which received nothing like the press coverage these ridiculous tea parties did. Guess how many people showed for the DC tea party? 3,000. Three f---ing thousand. That's your big scary tax revolt, after weeks of promotion on cable news.
I want to emphasize this point again. Even former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, whose FreedomWorks non-profit coordinated the tea parties, said on Meet the Press that there were "over 800 tea parties around the country, with attendance in the hundreds." Get that? That's hundreds. The largest congregation of teabaggers of all was in the largest southern capitol, Atlanta, numbering 15,000.
Folks, these numbers aren't modest; they are completely pathetic. 15,000 white people isn't a major people's movement; it's a Rush concert. In other cities, the protests drew fewer people than a good street magician. There is no legitimate justification for the amount of coverage these tiny crowds received.
The hard right—people who call guys like Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity "great Americans"—find themselves suddenly marginalized, powerless, irrelevant. There is a natural radicalization that goes along with this kind of political alienation, and we saw some of this on the left during the Bush years. The difference is that the "loony left" and even the not-so-loony left was almost completely ignored by the press in those years. Even now, the equivalents of these "Obama=Hitler" nutjobs on the left, if there are any, aren't paid any mind. However, this rapidly dwindling, obviously ignorant, increasingly manic fringe on the right is still somehow a major media focus point.
Why? Maybe it's because their ostensible message about taxes is one shared by the extremely wealthy, the ones who actually stand to lose something (about 4% of their income) if Obama's tax plan is implemented. Maybe it's because the press has been swallowed up by giant conglomerates, which also stand to lose. Of course, it's sad that there are always a few pawns willing to work on their behalf, but it's also pretty encouraging just how few of them there are. Despite the best efforts of hugely popular media outlets to confuse the issues and demonize Obama as a fascist socialist America-hater, his approval rating is at 64%. And in an amazing development, the majority of Americans don't even think their taxes are too high.
It seems that people may finally be wising up to the fraudulent economics of the GOP, despite the corporate press' best efforts to fool them. Yes, we have a huge debt problem, but we all know whose fault that is. And the only way we will ever pay down that debt is to raise taxes. That's not fascism; that's reality.
But reality is the last thing on the teabaggers' minds. In fact, reality is the enemy. What they want, what they appear to need, is something, anything, that will enable them to deny their own culpability in causing the truly horrific condition this country was in the day Obama walked into the Oval Office and Bush flew away from a crowd of jeering people--a very, very big crowd.
