Time for a TEA Party revival
A year and a half ago I wrote a piece here with the title “Grandma vs. The SWAT Team“, wherein I outlined an idea I had for generating an “iconic image” for the TEA Party movement, that of a little, old, blue haired lady sharing some cookies with a member of the SWAT team Obama had sent in to surround a TEA Party rally. The idea was prompted by the pictures we were seeing in the news at the time, that of illegal immigrants having semi-violent clashes with the police, and the images featured in the story I was discussing in the post, images of little old ladies standing in front of the line of SWAT officers, smiling, laughing, joking around, and taking pictures, but doing absolutely nothing arrest worthy.
I’ve always thought it a great idea, and pondered over the state of TEA Party PR ever since. I think now is the time to have a serious revisit on the idea.
There are a couple of reasons I think it’s time for the TEA Party to be aggressively engaged in a PR movement: The #OWS protests, media bias, and the same feelings of anonymity which fed the TEA Party movement in the first place.
1) The #OWS protests
The #OWS protests are being billed as the “Left’s answer to the TEA Party”. They’re the counter-revolution’s counter-revolution… if that makes any sense at all, but such is the state of American politics that we’ve got a movement of self proclaimed anarchists marching and rioting for bigger government. This is too great an opportunity to pass up, you know? The left is practically BEGGING for the TEA Party to have another rally. They have set themselves up as the equal of the TEA Party, draped themselves with the mantle of “representing the 99%” without ever asking the 99% if they wanted their representation (must be something to do with all of the #OWS people being union members), and then, in the manner of all liberal movements, degenerated into a crazed gathering of drug abusing, sexually predatorial hippies with a penchant for burning down businesses while complaining that they can’t find jobs.
If they’re really serious about setting themselves up as the answer to a TEA Party rally, we should earnestly consider now as being an optimum time to have that little show. It wouldn’t have to be the biggest rally, of course, but since the left can’t seem to get 500 #OWS protesters together without having a couple of cops assaulted by a mob, I’d think that maybe 30,000-50,000 TEA Party activists together, with their stellar record of cleanliness and law abiding behavior, should generate enough of a contrast between what we’re seeing in the left’s movement.
Why is this important?
Because, while the TEA Party has matured into a true political movement which doesn’t need massive demonstrations to get their message out, there will always exist the need for the basic populism which drove it from the start, the “Us vs. the politicians and system” mentality. Like how it’s still good for you to eat all of your veggies even though you’re no longer a child. And that’s the TEA Party’s chink-in-the-armor, a weakness which is being viciously exploited right now.
2) Media bias and the feelings of anonymity which helped feed the TEA Party movement
The reason the TEA Party was such a success was the state of mind of the normal conservative leaning American in early 2009. George W. Bush and his lowly band of idiots had run the country, and thus the image of conservatism Bush was supposed to represent, into the ground, and the nomination of I-vote-with-the-liberals-because-I’m-the-Maverick McCain just kicked them in the gut while they lay there in the dirt. The result had been an electoral bloodbath of Biblical proportions (I kid you not, a lot of church goers were worried about Obama being the anti-Christ it was so bad), leaving the conservative base, almost half of the country (according to Gallup), without any representation in the Legislative and Executive branches of the government. There weren’t enough Republicans in DC to pass the salt at dinner, much less legislation in Congress.
Then came Rick Santelli’s rant, an angry, hurt-filled diatribe against the lack of interest in the welfare of the tax paying citizens, the people who were actually working and paying the bills while watching their retirement portfolios and home values plummeting. Its loud clarion call echoed through out the land, and people realized that they weren’t really alone and ignored, political pariahs roaming a vast, dead expanse of an ideological desert. Rick Santelli felt the same as they did. Did anyone else? Hey! Yes, there are a lot of us! Why are we taking this quietly, again?
They came together, spontaneously and under their own power, footing their own bills, in a Mega-Demonstration which clogged DC and re-invented the term “gridlock”.
At that moment, the TEA Party knew it was Something. At that moment, it began to metamorphosize into Something Else. If there’s one thing you can say about the conservative religious right, they freakin’ know how to organize. They don’t have to go to school for it like Marxists do, they’ve been practicing in church since they were seven and had to start sitting through sermons instead of running off to children’s church. They walked away from the TEA Party rally a changed bunch, motivated, and at the drop of a hat, a viable political movement was born and woe betide any who moved to thwart them! They rolled to a massive victory in 2010, and the rout is now on.
The media, of course, HATED it. See, while the talking heads on TV exist to sell you detergent and washing machines, they delude themselves into thinking that they’re more than just a pretty face hawking goods for advertising revenue. They think that they have some sort of superior gravitas, that simply by virtue of being on TV on a regular basis they exist in some sort higher metaphysical realm than us workin’ stiffs and that their words move tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people to action! They relish their illusion of control over the masses, and when it was firmly demonstrated that many, many millions of people didn’t give a damn about what those mere men thought, well, it drove them up the wall. And not just MSNBC and CNN, either. The TEA Party idea is very concise, and easy to understand, unlike the #OWS; it’s built right into the name. Taxed Enough Already. Hannity can’t spin that. O’Reilly had no choice but to fall in line. The simplicity of the movement means it brooks no compromise, no distortion, no spin. It’s why the left’s attacks of racist motivation never stuck, it’s obviously about taxes being too high.
Thus, if you cannot spin the movement, if you cannot divide the opposition, you must surround it, cut it off from resupply, and wait for it to fizzle out and die from lack of reinforcements. This is the tactic the media is taking currently.
See, since the TEA Party victory in 2010, government entered gridlock. The GOP didn’t capture the Senate, just the House, and as such, the TEA Party was only able to stop the agenda, not reverse it. There isn’t much in the way of controversial legislation coming out of DC these days, which is why all of these reporters are now uncovering all of the scandals. They’re got to fill print and they can’t do it with a legislative circus anymore.
But this works to the media’s advantage. They are using the stories of foreign economic troubles, #OWS riots, Democrat scandals, nuclear Iran, Israeli pre-emptive attacks, all of this negative news, to make the TEA Party feel insignificant to the task of fixing this mess. In the eyes of the media, the TEA Party population needs to be re-educated, taught once again that they are not a majority, but are instead a meager collection of racist terrorists living out in the boonies and that they should just meekly resume doing as they’re told, scared and camping out in their bomb shelters, self flagellating in repentence over a system of slavery in which they didn’t participate because it was ended 100 years before they were born. They’re flooding the news cycles with negative stories, and at the same time, decreasing coverage of the TEA Party by virtue of there simply being less available time remaining in the programming cycle.
The TEA Party is portrayed as losing steam, and the #OWS, while violent, as growing in popularity. The media has rightly realized that the TEA Party was somewhat reactive, based on an anger at the government and a desire to have your voice heard. They get that object lesson every time Rush tells them how long it takes a particular caller to get through to talk on his radio show, and the person then vents a TEA Party message. Conservatives still feel repressed by the media, like they’re not being heard. They’re being told they’ve gotten gridlock in DC, not repeals, problems are rising which need to be dealt with but aren’t, that the whole world is coming crashing down on them.
The solution being presented is to simply give up, nominate the Second Coming of John McCain, Mitt Romney, sit out the 2012 election, and let things go back to the way they were.
The conservatives are surrounded. They’re not divided, but they’re being squeezed in on all sides. It’s time for the TEA Party led movement to realize once again that they are indeed the majority, and that the forces surrounding them are stretched exceedingly thin. One good push, concentrated in just about any direction, would be enough to break the opposition’s siege.
Do another rally. While local TEA Parties are doing small scale stuff all the time, the media isn’t covering any of them. It’s the same thing we saw when Katrina hit New Orleans: The cameras only go to where they can get lots of people in a single shot. They covered the people trapped in New Orleans, but not the people who got away but lost everything and had to start all over. The TEA Party has to do something which gets the media’s attention, draws in a bunch of cameras, and then remains 100% TEA Party. Clean, non-violent, no arrests, singing hymns. Let that follow an #OWS riot bit in the news cycle for 24 or 48 hours instead of more bad news. Flash from scenes of brutal clashes with police to masses of people singing hymns instead of stories about impending nuclear war in the Middle East.
It would revive the flagging TEA Party spirit. Provide the momentum required to get through the 2012 race. It would illuminate to the American public, and the world, the differences between the competing ideologies. Violent anarchy vs. orderly adherence to the reasonable rule of law.
Much of the TEA Party’s success has been based on the efforts of religious people, indeed, one of the premises of the movement is that more people need to adopt ye olde tyme Protestant work ethic again. Combine that fact with the idea that the church, regardless of your feelings about the truth of its religion, has had social control mastered for thousands of years and you can learn a lot of lessons from the study of its rituals. Religions of all types have periodic, regular revivals and rallies where representatives of many churches come from all over. The Bible itself commands its followers to make a habit of gathering together regularly. It helps buoy the spirits of the faithful, awes them with scope and scale, making them feel like they’re part of something worthwhile and important.
It’s time for another TEA Party rally. The TEA Party needs to seriously consider making them regular, periodic revivals.
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I’m going with Glenn on this one: “…when your opponent is committing suicide, you should keep your mouth shut.”
Charlie
Thanks to Mr. Reynolds for taking the time to read this! I appreciate it!
I’m not convinced they’re committing suicide. Never underestimate the GOP’s ability to muck up a sure thing.
–Mike
I sympathize, but find it hard to see trying to get a big Tea Party event just to say, “Hey, we’re still here.” The Tea Party has been a genuine grass-roots phenomenon and that means, among other things, that a leadership cannot just gin something up because it seems tactically timely. If they try and the time is wrong, they won’t get a good response and THAT will be the story.
I trust that the organizational infrastructure of key people and phone/email lists is still there, and when the time comes, everyone will know it and the real people will go to the leadership and insist on a big rally or other public action.
Instead, how about a great number of meetings, lasting no more
than an hour at most, at the same time on the same date, outside of newspaper offices, radio and television stations, etc., conducted
civilly, at low volume?
This instead of having folks spend time and money
traveling, just a million or so locally….
Mike, Insty meant the #OWS is committing suicide, not the GOP.
And having a tea party rally now to challenge OWS is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard in a while. As awful as having a counter tea party rally at the height of the Wisconsin protest.
Or giving a dying, getting-more-violent OWS a second life by confronting them them in the streets. You know you geriatric gun toting yanks will lose to the anarchists and energetic young people.
admit it, the tea party’s popularity took a hit during the debt ceiling debate, plunging to 20% approval.
In the county of Goochland, Va, every candidate endorsed by the local Tea Party was elected. We unseated 2 incumbent supervisors , one of which had been on the board since Nixon was president. We changed the School Board and helped elect our new State Senator, giving Republicans control of the Senate. Our county officials have been put on notice that the old ways of doing business will not be tolerated and we aim to keep their feet to the fire. Effective change will have to come from the bottom up. Locally is where your votes and support have the greatest leverage. The top will go where the base leads.
I don’t think a hi-visibility TP rally is necessary at this point. The grassroots have matured into a political force that, after all, won back control of the Congress in 2010. It’s moved past the streets, and fanned out into local offices and school boards, which is the way to put down deep roots and a strong culture. More should be done to clarify principles and views on specific issues, which require communication and networking, not street rallies.
Besides, no matter what the TP does, it will never be covered accurately. Even if they conduct a perfect rally, media will find something negative to highlight, or make something up. It is not a fight TP can ever win. But as a mature political force, highly networked and constantly expanding, exerting influence at all levels of politics, they can.
Finally, some parts of the TP might need a gut check. When it came time to find entitlement, Medicare and SS cuts or reform, the very people who supported TP values suddenly bolted. You cannot yell for fiscal conservatism and financial reform, and then say “but don’t touch my Medicare” when that is the largest slice of the federal budget pie. This kind of thing undermines credibility. There has to be a willingness to look at reforming these programs (not doing away with them entirely) or the debt and deficit problems will never be resolved.
Where there is no spending, there is no need for taxes. There’s plenty of dead weight loss on the spending side that can be dropped and not just on the federal level. In my own municipality, they’re running a restaurant at a loss. That needs to get off the town books. The county runs an amusement park. A neighboring municipality has separate motor pools for general vehicles, police, fire, and emergency services, all with low usage. That needs consolidation. Every one of these changes is ripe for tea party activism in between big federal pushes.
We should be learning from what the unions did in Ohio in concentrating their power and stand in solidarity to bring to bear more manpower down on these issues and make a sort of roving parade of spending efficiencies and reductions.
Here’s your headline:
“Violent clashes between Tea Party mob and unarmed youths”
Yeah.
That’s what would happen should Tea Partiers try to rally now to demonstrate differences between them and OWS. The more violent among the occupy crowd would confront them and even if the Tea Partiers refuse to take the bait, the mainstream media would report it as if it were both sides clashing – or the Tea Partiers as the aggressors.
Welcome to the intifada redux – US edition.
.
Agreed. The violent ethos on the left these days ensures they will physically attack any identified conservative, man or woman, old or young. Look what the mobs did to elderly women at the Washington Convention Ctr. It was just a dinner, not a rally, yet they swarmed the exits in a hostile action that police were ill-prepared for. All you’d be doing is giving them someone’s light’s to punch out, and the police won’t be able to protect you.
They are brazen about going physical, as they were last year with Kenneth Gladney in clearly identified SEIU shirts, because they know police won’t stop them, and media will gloss over any negative consequences.
The place to show up is on election day, at the voting booth.
We are still out here, us true Tea Partiers. We are not going anywhere till this country gets back to constitutional balance.
Rumors of our demise are greatly exaggerated.
Having a large-scale Tea Party rally now, to “challenge” the OWS crowd, would give OWS more legitimacy than anything else that’s happened to date. It would also feed the notion that the “occupy” movement is an equivalent, a counterpart, to the Tea Party movement and that is the LAST thing it needs. Something that you can almost always seem to guarantee conservatives, whether Republican or not, will do in this country is fall for a sucker’s bet, and acknowledging the occupy movement is exactly that sucker’s bet. Don’t do it. Let them implode, let all the people out there trying to draw comparisons get egg on their face, let them look dumb, the protesters themselves are doing a great job of it. The Tea Party should concentrate on local elections, first and foremost, because if you want to fix things in this country, it has to start at the level where the most asinine laws, corruption and erosion of freedom takes place without anyone noticing it, the local school board, the county board, the city council, magistrate courts, sheriffs’ office, and the tin pot dictatorships called “homeowners associations” :)
I think some large Tea Party rallies are OK, but not right now. It would just give the anarchists a target to riot against, with the Tea Partiers then being blamed for the resulting riot. First wait a few more weeks until the OWS totally implodes. They are already being thrown out of cities, with leftist mayors and populations that should have embraced them, because their complete lawlessness and lack of respect for others has even disgusted the leftist leaning local residents. If your opponent is destroying their credibility, get out of the way and let them.
Once the OWS has been finally thrown out of most cities, and completely discredited, then will be the time for Tea Party rallies. The anarchists will be gone then, and can no longer attack them in sufficient numbers, and the contrast of Tea Party order, cleanliness, and politeness, vs OWS lawlessness, filth, and rudeness, will be all the more striking.