Tea Party Day
I’ve found myself really mixed about this whole Tea Party business. I’ve expressed amply my reservations, but it was by sheer chance that I wandered into the Pittsburgh Tea Party today.
I hadn’t planned on going, but I’m back in Pittsburgh on a contract job this spring, and also picking up some more freelance work. I was out on my lunch break pounding the pavement and dropping off portfolios downtown, and the tea party was there, in full swing, so I stopped by, if for no other reason than I figured I’d run into some of my old friends from the Ron Paul movement (seems like a decade ago now).
On first blush I was pretty impressed. There was a pretty sizable crowd, a few T.V. cameras, and it was all set up in Market Square downtown, dead center in Pittsburgh’s busiest block for foot traffic. Like the Ron Paul rallies of old, the cross-section of people with signs, the obvious activist, cheered me up. Crazies, maybe, but my kind of crazies. And for the most part, the signage and the speaker up at the podium were all in relative accord. All a generalized message against government spending. Some explicitly anti-Obama, but more were just generally anti big government (with maybe the single biggest bloc being anti-Fed signs). The first speaker I caught identified herself as from D.C., a representative of FreedomWorks, which she described as “a grassroots organization with over 500,000 members (leaving out that it’s a lobbying organization run by Dick Armey). Nevertheless, the message was very broadly anti-government, and sounded pretty good to me.
I did indeed know a handful of people. I ran into the head of the Pittsburgh Libertarian Party, an old friend of mine, and they were there, as Libertarians always. We chatted for a bit, and though he didn’t go into details, when I said something like “looks like you guys have done well”, he made it very clear that it wasn’t “his guys”. “This is a Tea Party thing. It’s their thing, FreedomWorks” When I said “well, at least the Republican establishment is finally on board”, he guffawed and said something to the effect of “Yeah. Be nice if they did this, say, when it mattered. Great to seem them out talking about spending two years after the primary”.
The Campaign for Liberty people who had a table set up seemed more enthused and a part of it all. They were, it looked to me, just thrilled to once again have a big crowd, and were pushing an upcoming rally of theirs on the 25th.
By the time I was ready to leave, they had gone through another speaker (a local radio jockey), and some other guy was talking. He immediately started banging on about New World Order Socialist Obama kind of stuff. The activists were loving it, but by then I was on the periphery of the crowd and the response ranged between bemusement and active mockery. Two comments overheard verbatim: “They sound like a cult,” and “boarding the Mothership now”. The speaker then veered wildly off course and for some damn reason started banging on first about “the lie of global warming” and then about, bizarrely, multiculturalism and something to do with the second amendment in relation to illegal immigrants (we should be able to shoot them, I guess). That’s when I left.
Positives: It was really nice to see so many people gathered and so enthusiastic in support of limited government. It definitely harkened back to the Ron Paul days, and for awhile there they seemed to have most of the crowd on their side when they were just being anti-tax and anti-spending. I also always get a charge out of civic imagination, and that this was clearly well organized and going on all over the country did indeed make me rethink my assumptions. What’s more, one thing struck me, as it had before only in theory: this was a Republican D.C.-based party organ essentially pulling the strings to throw Ron Paul rallies all over America. It was unmistakable. When you think about it, that’s pretty incredible.
Negatives: As I said, it veered wildly off message. And though I was initially flush with warm fuzzies, talking to the LP and the Ron Paul friends of mine from the campaign days, the guys that virtually single-handedly ran the limited government movement in Pittsburgh, there was a definite and explicit sense of unease. One of the guys who had added the event to our Meetup group months and months ago seemed very…well, hedging his praise. The overwhelming impression I got is that the real local activists here who have been on the streets for years for the cause weren’t yet sure what to make of this. I was told that it had originally been planned by Ron Paul guys, but a few months ago the crew from FreedomWorks basically swooped in, scheduled their own event (but with money behind it), and took charge. “It’s their show now” one of the CfL people said a little wistfully and not without a smidgen of resentment.
Believe it or not, that’s not the message I was looking for. I just wandered in, and as I said, at first blush, was already planning the post recanting my criticisms. On a surface level, at least until the speakers started veering into more standard Republican foot soldier tropes, it looked pretty damn good to me. Digging deeper and scratching a bit under the surface though, my sense of unease about the whole operation came back.
I still wish them well, and you know what, if there’s a protest like that in every city today, that’s pretty hard not be enthusiastic about and supportive of. But I still can’t shake the feeling, and apparently neither could the Pittsburgh grassroots, that there was a patina of interloping about the whole deal, the administrators taking the asylum back from the inmates. Nobody was ready to denounce that, and they were guardedly (very guardedly) happy about the whole thing, but that sense of unease lingered, at least if you knew which faces in the crowd to look to (in my case, the Pittsburgh grassroots, and the casual observers).
I only got a very superficial look at the Kansas City event. But man, it was HUGE. I actually ran into it by accident because I was trying to get somewhere else and traffic was backed up for blocks in every direction. Definitely at least 1500 people there.
And frankly…judging by what was visible, it was very libertarian in its sentiment. Lots of Gadsden flags and sentiment directed specifically at debt and the size of government. I was quite cheered by it, really. Maybe I had these people wrong.
Comment by Rojas — 4/15/2009 @ 9:38 pm
That was actually nearly my exact first impression.
Upon closer examination, it became pretty clear who was running the show, and that’s what made me feel an undercurrent of unease about it. But that might have just been me and the sampling of people I talked to. Still, I couldn’t get over the impression that it was nearly exactly a Ron Paul rally—same people same tenor same vibe—just under new management. And I guess what I’m saying is I don’t quite trust the new management, and checking under the veneer here and there didn’t make me feel any better.
But, who knows, maybe it’s just a fear of success and a certain possessiveness.
Comment by Brad — 4/15/2009 @ 9:56 pm
If that’s the impression the public–including the rest of the Republican Party–gets as to the sentiment of the tea parties, then I don’t care WHO is “managing” them.
If we’re now the face of the Republican Party, that’s a hell of a lot better than being its ass.
Comment by Rojas — 4/15/2009 @ 10:01 pm
Yeah, and you know what, maybe I just need to readjust my attitude. I certainly have no friggin’ interest in sharing a foxhole with the likes of Michelle Malkin, and my reservation is in large measure because I don’t feel they have our, or the ideology’s, best interest at heart—in fact I know they don’t.
But maybe I ought to just start seeing this as a bizarro teaching moment wherein the Republican party writ large gets out their notebooks and start taking cues from the Paulites on what a principled opposition actually looks like. And they’re not going to get it all, or even most if it, but it’s better that they’re taking instruction than giving it for a change.
Comment by Brad — 4/15/2009 @ 10:25 pm
Man, blogs are awesome.
Watch me be conflicted in real time!
Comment by Brad — 4/15/2009 @ 10:34 pm
Well, the problem is, Rojas, I’m not sure what YOU saw today is the same face that the rest of the public saw. It could be largely a function of the media I expose myself to, nevertheless I saw a lot of loonies pretty much on par with that Obama/Hitler Youth video you posted the other day. I KNOW that’s not the whole story, but even with you guys as my “man on the inside” it’s very hard to discount people carrying around signs calling Obama a fascist, questioning his nationality, or aping any number of right-wing radio tropes.
Comment by tessellated — 4/15/2009 @ 11:09 pm
I’ll borrow an analogy from another blog: if a streaker takes the field at a baseball game, do you assume the crowd are closet nudists?
I can, of course, only speak to what I saw personally, and maybe somewhat more broadly to what people driving on Quivira Street in Overland Park Kansas saw. But for those who saw what I saw: we saw a lot of peaceful, civil, engaged Americans, and a whole lot of them were very publicly flogging a libertarian message.
I walked away from this a lot less cynical than I walked into it. And that’s a rare experience for me where Republicans are concerned.
Comment by Rojas — 4/15/2009 @ 11:26 pm
At the rally I saw, the rhetoric on the stage started to get too off-kilter for me, but the signage was as Rojas said very libertarianish. Just basically a lot of stuff against spending and debt and the fed. I didn’t see anything in terms of the crowd or the signs that off-put me.
But there was definitely a sense of being weirdly personally fixated on Obama, though that came mostly from the speakers. I think because it’s a weird time for this kind of demonstration. By far most Americans are willing to give Obama the benefit of the doubt (as I believe is fair enough)—they aren’t at all ripe for turning on him, and frankly I think the Republicans are doing just as good a job at repelling from them as from Obama.
That said, this is very very early. The opposition can afford for their opponents have a few laughs at their expense. But what is happening is, ironically, almost a theatrical acceptance-back-into-the-fold of the diehard fiscal conservative activists, which is where I might be getting a little converted. Think of it as the last dress rehearsal where the cast can bond, the kinks can get worked out, there’s an audience but even they know this isn’t the real show yet. This can easily be outdone, I think, by the Republican choosing a different wedge in addition—say, foreign policy muscularity. But given Obama doesn’t seem very receptive to those kinds of attacks and the GOP don’t seem to be trying anyway, that seems unlikely. Marginally more likely is social conservatism, but even then, I’m not so sure the GOP is going to go for that for 2010 and 2012.
Weirdly, this may be a culmination of one of the themes that began this site. Namely, Rojas Adam and I wishing that the GOP would learn how to be a principled opposition to big government again, to get back to their core values. The tea parties represent a halting, ugly, ungainly step in that direction, and nobody said it was going to be pretty. But it is a step.
When I ran into the rally I got really infused with a good feeling. As I wandered some more and lingered awhile, that gave way to a lot of unease. But now that I’m reflecting more, the unease is beginning to dissipate again. Like Rojas, I think I’m starting to lean on the side of getting less cynical about it.
And, weirdly, now that I think about it that’s a lot like the general drift of my feelings regarding the Ron Paul Revolution.
Comment by Brad — 4/15/2009 @ 11:36 pm