At first glance, this may not seem obvious. After all, the most serious estimate of the events’ size – by Nate Silver – suggests that as many as 250,000 people around the country may have participated. That doesn’t sound like a failure.
But, put into context, it is.
The context I’m talking about is what the conservative backers of the events hoped –and in fact desperately needed – to happen.
The objective of the campaign was to demonstrate that there really was a significant grass-roots surge of opposition growing to the Obama administrations’ economic and political agenda – a surge of opposition that was not reflected in the opinion polls. To be a success in these terms, the events had to convincingly show a genuine and spontaneous groundswell of “ordinary folks” coming out in cities, towns across America. If the protests turned out to be just a spring break reunion of the same, pissed-off gang who showed up for the Sarah Palin rallies last fall, it would be a huge failure.
Here’s how the FreedomWorks website put it:

“These events are not simply showcasing conservative ire, but recruiting volunteers to join the ranks of FreedomWorks as we march on to our membership goal of a million activists committed to liberty; a force capable of not only doing battle with the Left, but winning.”

And here is Debbie Ellis Dooby, grassroots coordinator for FreedomWorks in Georgia:

“I think of what General Yamamoto said after he had been told of the attack on Pearl Harbor. He said, ‘They have just succeeded in awakening a sleeping giant’. I think that’s what’s happening now, the awakening of a Silent Majority”

The organizers did not necessarily think they would reach their goals immediately, but the urgent political and public relations objective they urgently needed to achieve was to exceed the size of the major peace, anti-Bush and pro-immigration demonstrations of the preceding years. They needed to be able to say that “the real America” had now come out, dwarfing the puny demonstrations of the “Loony Left” and their followers.
They didn’t succeed.
As Chris Bowers details, the February 15th 2003 anti-Iraq invasion protests produced substantially larger crowds in major US cities — in New York – 100,000, in Los Angeles – 50-60,000, in San Francisco – 150,000, in Seattle – 50,000, in Chicago – 10,000.
And then there were the 2006 “national day of action for immigration justice” demonstrations – several hundred thousand people participated in Washington, DC, more than 100,000 in Los Angeles and the same in Phoenix, Arizona. 30,000-40,000 turned out in Atlanta and lesser numbers in scores of cities.
By contrast, according to Nate Silver’s estimates the biggest Tea Party – in Atlanta, where Sean Hannity spoke, attracted around 7,000 people. Then came Denver, Phoenix, Madison, San Antonio, Olympia, Lansing, Jacksonville, Oklahoma City and Dallas with around 4,500-5,000 participants in each. At the next level were cities like Sacramento, Tulsa, Hartford, Sioux Falls, Cincinnati, and Nashville -with 3,000-4,000 each. Smaller cities across the country had correspondingly smaller turnouts.
All together, Silver estimated about 250,000 participated across the county – significantly less than either the anti-war or pro-immigration protests.
And don’t think for a moment the conservative movement wasn’t absolutely desperate to beat those comparisons. The best proof is the complete absence of headlines trumpeting the “historic” turnout numbers on the Fox website today. Somewhere in the graphics department over at Fox HQ graphic designers have been deleting useless files with all sorts of lurid background visuals they had prepared for today – – visuals covered with flags, eagles and headlines saying “A Million Patriots stand up for America”, “The Silent Majority Shows Obama Its Muscle”, “Biggest Grass-Roots Protests in US history Shake Obama Administration To Its Core”, “Million-Plus Tea Bag Protesters Send Obama unmistakable Message” and so on.
In fact, the ultimate effect of the Tea Bag Party protests was, in political terms, actually counterproductive. Rather than impressing and intimidating the Obama administration and impressing non-base voters, the relatively modest size of the protests has reassured the administration and had no effect on most Americans. A protest movement needs tens of thousands of people to show up in a range of major cities to make a significant political impression, it needs thousands of people in mid-sized and smaller cities and hundreds in small towns. The Tea Bag protests were, in general, an order of magnitude smaller in each category. In fact, they looked like just what they were – gatherings of the rock-ribbed conservative base that everyone already knew was out there.
Bottom line: in political terms, the demonstrations didn’t move the dial at all. Result: the big, really big winner of the day was Barack Obama.
The day was also an unmitigated – and I mean really unmitigated — disaster for Fox news. They went way, way out on a limb to promote the Tea Party protests, making them a critical test of Fox News’ ability to actually mobilize conservative voters and get them on the streets as opposed to just selling them barbeque grills and preparation H. Fox head Roger Ailes, who is usually quite savvy, let himself get caught in the trap of allowing the size of the events to become a decisive “show of strength” of the network’s political clout. Instead it turned into a disastrous “show of weakness” that clearly demonstrated that Obama does not have to fear them in the future.
Rupert Murdoch, despite his recent protestations, may very well be just as conservative as Ailes. But this was just stupid, and Murdoch doesn’t like stupid. It’s a damn good bet that he won’t ever let Ailes pull this kind of stunt again.
Obama must be smiling.
P.S. Unlike Fox News, FreedomWorks and the related coordinating groups actually did pretty well. They ended up with the lists of local organizers and the recognized “clearing house” websites for the protests.
They may very well find, however, that hearty “salt of the earth”, grass-roots types don’t take orders like the nice little CPAC interns with neat suits and ties that they are used to. They are going to have a bit of a culture shock when they try to tell a pot-bellied guy with a “Don’t Tread On Me” teashirt, a grey pony tail , a Mossberg 12- gauge pump, and a vintage Harley to follow their orders because they know better than he does what’s best for America.
That, however, is a discussion for another day.

I guess extraordinary times lead to extraordinary talk, but Texas Governor Rick Perry seems to have an extraordinarily limited knowledge of American history, looking at some of his remarks this week about states’ rights.
Perry got the most attention for hinting at a revival of Texas secessionist sentiment. Via Steve Benen, we hear him respond to calls of “Secede!” from a “tea party” event yesterday:

“There’s a lot of different scenarios,” Perry said. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.

Now there’s always been a lot of semi-facetious Texas Independence talk in the Lone Star State, so I take this flirtation with secession by Perry with a shaker of salt. But less noticed was his more forthright effort to raise the banner of “states’ rights” in a different statement:

I believe the federal government has become oppressive. It’s become oppressive in its size, its intrusion in the lives of its citizens, and its interference with the affaris of our state.
Texans need to ask themselves a question. Do they side with those in Washington who are pursuing this unprecendented expansion of power, or do they believe in individual rights and responsibilities laid down in our foundational documents.
Where’re you gonna’ stand? With an ever-growing Washington bureaucracy, or are you going to stand with the people of this state who understand the importance of state’s rights.
Texans need to stand up. They need to be heard, because the state of affairs that we find ourselves in cannot continue indefinitely…
…We think it’s time to draw the line in the sand and tell Washington that no longer are we going to accept their oppressive hand in the state of Texas.

It’s been quite some time since it’s been respectable in major-party politics, even in the South, to prattle about “states’ rights.” You can promote “federalism,” yeah, and bash Washington all day long, sure. But issuing the old rebel yell of “states’ rights” is a bit edgy, even for Rick Perry. Looks like W.’s handpicked successor as governor of Texas is determined to nail down that hard-core conservative vote early in his anticipated primary battle next year with Kay Bailey Hutchison.

This week has brought the long-delayed resolution of the 2008 U.S. Senate contest in Minnesota to a near-end, with a special three-judge panel appointed by the state Supreme Court rejecting Norm Coleman’s petition to include additional absentee ballots and paving the way for Al Franken to finally assume the seat.
Coleman will immediately appeal the decision to the state Supremes, but nobody much seems to think they are likely to overrule the special panel they created to resolve the dispute. And there’s also been talk that Coleman might follow up an exhaustion of his state remedies by going into federal court and asking for a Bush v. Gore-style intervention on federal constitutional grounds. But aside from the unique this-isn’t-precedent principle embedded in Bush v. Gore, the real obstacle to use of this avenue is the vast difference between the rational recount and dispute-resolution process used by Minnesota, and the crazy-quilt chaos of Florida in 2000.
And so, as Norm Coleman’s Senate career almost certainly expires, with it, too, should expire one of the “lessons of 2000” so often drawn from that horrific experience: that the side exhibiting the most aggressive tactics always wins election-result disputes.
It’s an article of faith among many progressives that Gore and Lieberman lost the election in 2000 well before the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, by exhibiting a naive respect for the rule of law while the Bushies laughed at them contemptuously and blew their doors off in manipulating the process by any means necessary. That’s certainly the impression left by the much-watched HBO movie Recount, where an effete and pompous Warren Christopher, who worried about New York Times editorials and the judgment of history, was decisively outflanked from the beginning by the charmingly vicious Jim Baker. Indeed, the idea that Democrats handed Bush the presidency through a weak and supercilious concern for fair play provided a lot of the impetus (according to some accounts) for the whole “netroots” phenomenon of the ensuing years.
As Josh Marshall notes today via a reader email, Al Franken has been the quieter, more rules-observing contestant in the Minnesota dispute. And that seems to have paid off politically: according to a new poll, 63% of Minnesotans now want Coleman to concede. This is important because it places pressure on MN Gov. Tim Pawlenty to certify Frankel as a senator if Coleman loses his state appeal, without waiting to see what happens in a possible federal suit.
My point here is not to relitigate the argument over Al Gore’s tactics in 2000, though my personal opinion is that the key mistake was the failure to push for a statewide recount from the get-go: it’s that going forward the best way to prevent the recurrence of the 2000 nightmare was and remains a push for election reforms at the state and national levels that create more Minnesotas and fewer Floridas. Something that often got lost in the recriminations over Florida in 2000 is that Gore would have won without any recount whatsoever had the Florida election machinery under Katherine Harris not been allowed to play havoc with voter rolls and election sites before any vote was cast. Barack Obama’s decisive victory last year has probably reduced the already-low interest level of many Democratic elected officials in election reform. They should compare Florida 2000 with Minnesota 2008, and rethink their indifference about how we hold elections in this country.

If you’re a progressive who has paid attention to the Tea Party protests, there’s been a lot to laugh about.
First, after weeks of build up, we’ve learned that many of these gatherings were small, and on the East Coast at least, rain-drenched affairs. The Right had been comparing this event to the Iraq War protests, which engaged tens of millions across the globe, and whatever this is, it isn’t that. Nate Silver estimates that around 250,000 people participated, which as we noted earlier puts turnout below the pro-immigration rallies three years ago.
Second, the guy who helped to launch this idea in the popular imagination — CNBC personality Rick Santelli — couldn’t be bothered to attend one of these Tea Parties himself. In fact, he told reporters, “I have to work to pay my taxes so I’m not going to be able to get away today.”
Third, it turns out that a lot of people interested in these protests have no idea that the phrase ‘tea bagging’ has some pretty strong sexual connotations. So much so that FreedomWorks — Dick Armey’s group that has done so much to organize today’s fun — took to distributing flyers at the protests, telling fellow conservatives not to get duped.
And, it is pretty clear that some very traditional powers-that-be in the conservative movement, in an effort to prove their own relevancy, did a lot to make these supposedly-grassroots protests a reality. Brian Beutler, among others, has convincingly shown that this idea was conceived by FreedomWorks and helped along the way by it and organizations like Newt Gingrich’s American Solutions. As we noted in a staff post this yesterday, that’s astroturfing.
But …
We live in a time of hyperconnectivity. Even an event pulled together with extensive centralized planning can take on a life of its own through the Internet. I suspect that’s exactly what happened here.
A search for “Tax Day Tea Party” returns 4,100,000 results on Google. No matter how effort FreedomWorks put into this thing, they could not generate that kind of attention alone.
More telling still, #teaparty is currently one of the most popular hashtags on Twitter and has been for days. As we’ve discussed before, there isn’t a better tool for online organizing, and yesterday’s protests are dominating discussion on the service.
My point is that Democrats shouldn’t dismiss these protests out of hand. While this thing may have begun artificially, it has developed some real roots along the way.
The Right doesn’t have much experience with activism like this, and we’re all learning about the best ways to engage the public in the age of the Internet.
But we dismiss yesterday’s events at our own peril. Conservatives aren’t simply going to wait for the Obama presidency to end before they try to re-assume power. And they’re quickly learning some cool new tricks that we’d do well to study also.

Nate Silver at 538.com has made a noble effort to compile estimates of crowd sizes for “tea party” events yesterday, and has come up with an aggregate total of around 250,000 folks at 306 sites. The sheer number of events is probably more impressive than total attendance, which, after all, fell far short of attendance at pro-immigration-reform protests in 2006.
As for impressionistic coverage of the events, there’s lots of amusing-to-horrifying reportage at savetherich.com. Byron York of the Washington Examiner has one of the best-written sympathetic accounts, based on what he saw and heard in Winchester, VA.

Print Version
Editor’s Note: this TDS Strategy Memo, written by Andrew Levison, provides a unique historical perspective on President Obama’s much-debated strategy for promoting a progressive agenda in Washington, drawing on the lessons of the civil rights movement.
Obama’s ambitious budget has profoundly reassured many Democrats that he is indeed the progressive he appeared to be during the 2008 campaign. But there is still widespread concern about his continued desire to achieve some degree of “bipartisanship.”
For many progressives, Barack Obama’s notion of “bipartisanship” reflects a political strategy rooted in a timid, overly weak and compliant variety of 1990’s centrism — a political strategy that the Democratic Party finally rejected after the 2004 election, leading to the gains in the elections of 2006 and 2008. In this view, Obama’s attempts to negotiate with congressional Republicans over his stimulus and budget programs and his continuing expressions of a desire to win the support of moderate Republican legislators for his health and energy plans represent a serious threat to compromise and dilute the progressive vision reflected in his budget.
The progressive alternative to Obama’s strategy that this critical view suggests seems obvious: a much more consistently combative, fiercely partisan and unyieldingly progressive approach, one that seeks to maximize Democratic victories and reject any unnecessary compromise. As Digby, for example argued: “Only in the beltway bubble is there some expectation that everyone is going to agree. The rest of us would prefer that our politicians stand up for what they believe in and try to do what they promised”.
This approach was developed and championed by the Democratic grassroots and netroots during the Bush years and it is also often suggested that it is also the modern version of the political strategy that underlay the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s.
The Civil Rights Movement was indeed militant and confrontational in many of its tactics such as sit-ins, freedom rides and street demonstrations. But, in the particular approach developed and employed by Martin Luther King and SCLC, the broader, long-term strategy the movement followed was actually a good deal more complex. In fact, Obama’s seemingly unique political strategy did not appear out of thin air in 2008. Its roots actually lie in one particular perspective that emerged out of the civil rights movement and that drew heavily upon the lessons the movement learned during the Birmingham and Chicago campaigns.
Before proceeding, it is necessary to emphasize one key fact. Recognizing that Obama’s political strategy has its roots in strategies developed by King and SCLC does not imply that progressives and the progressive movement today are obliged to support and employ the same approach Obama chooses for his Presidential political strategy. Quite the contrary, Martin Luther King’s strategy in relation to both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson suggests precisely the opposite – – that King felt he and the movement had to always maintain a separate and explicitly progressive political role and identity, in contrast to even a relatively liberal President who King understood would often have to make compromises and respond to other political imperatives. But what this interpretation of Obama’s strategy does require is a substantial revision of the notion that Obama’s approach can be dismissed as simply a warmed-over version of 1990’s centrism.

Read more…

One of the under-appreciated aspects of the “tea parties” we’ll hearing about today is the dance of indecision among Republican officeholders about how closely to identify with this phenomenon. Sure, it’s tempting to snuggle up to a populist-sounding “movement”–however artificial and “astroturfed” it actually is–that’s in rough accord with the GOP’s simplistic anti-tax and anti-spending rhetoric. But aside from the possibility that the “tea parties” will be a bust in terms of attendance, there’s the unfocused, and generally anti-incumbent, atmosphere of the events, and lots of sheer craziness.
Even if those concerns are overcome, there’s the legitimate fear among Republicans that the tea parties will offend the big majority of Americans who are a bit more worried about the economic crisis than about the horrible injustice of boosting the top marginal income tax rate to where it was eight years ago. One of the larger mistakes made by the Republican Party in recent years was the decision to align itself with the hard-core Cultural Right in the Terry Schiavo saga, a decision that clearly repelled millions of people. The tea parties have the potential of becoming another such moment.
In any event, Ben Smith of Politico has a rundown of where some of the leading Republican pols will be today. Lots of them have apparently found something to do other than joining their local anti-tax shriekathons.

The publication of a long, interesting, if somewhat meandering Newsweek cover piece by John Meachem entitled “The End of Christian America” has spurred a brief resurgence of blogospheric debate on the whole church-state separation issue.
Much of the debate has been stimulated by Damon Linker at The New Republic, who has simultaneously argued against the “Christian Nation” concept, while also suggesting that a watered-down version of Christianity known as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (MTD) might serve quite well as a “civic religion.”
Much of the blowback Linker has generated comes from this second assertion, which offers a pretty easy target insofar as Damon himself describes MTD as a theological abomination. Rod Dreher waxes indignant about the patent emptiness of MTD as a source for prophetic political action such as the civil rights movement. Ross Douthat more broadly asserts that the kind of thinking behind MTD is more dangerous than anything promoted by the Christian Right:

[Y]ou don’t have to look terribly hard to see a connection between the kind of self-centered, sentimental, and panglossian religion described above and the spirit of unwarranted optimism and metaphysical self-regard that animated some of Bush’s worst hours as President (his second inaugural address could have been subtitled: “Moral Therapeutic Deism Goes to War”) and some of his fellow Americans’ worst hours as homeowners and investors. In the wake of two consecutive bubble economies, it takes an inordinate fear of culture war, I think, to immerse yourself in the literature of Oprahfied religion – from nominal Christians like Joel Osteen to New Age gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Rhonda Byrne – and come away convinced that this theological turn has been “salutary” for the country overall.

I’m mentioning this discussion here because church-state separation issues tend to divide not only progressives from conservatives, and believers from seculars, but even progressive believers from each other. Damon notes my own “Augustinian dualist” position in the post above, which can be roughly described as staunch support for strict church-state separation on both civic and religious grounds. So count me as someone who agrees with Damon Linker on the threat to American liberties and traditions posed by the Christian Right (and for that matter, the Christian Left if it ever became really popular), but who also doesn’t like the religious or political implications of some Christian Lite “civic religion” like Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. I don’t think America really needs a “civic religion;” we should be able to get by as a secular republic characterized by religious (and irreligious) diversity, thank you very much.
So that puts me in the camp, for once, of the polymath Michael Lind, whose own essay for Salon on the latest Christian Nation debate flatly denies that religion, rigorous or Lite, is necessary for democracy, even though some (if not all) of the Founders felt that it was:

In [George] Washington’s day, it may have been reasonable for the elite to worry that only fear of hellfire kept the masses from running amok, but in the 21st century it is clear that democracy as a form of government does not require citizens who believe in supernatural religion. Most of the world’s stable democracies are in Europe, where the population is largely post-Christian and secular, and in East Asian countries like Japan where the “Judeo-Christian tradition” has never been part of the majority culture.

But as Lind points out, strict church-state separation not only protects secular society from religious abuses, but also protects religion from manipulation for political reasons:

The idea that religion is important because it educates democratic citizens in morality is actually quite demeaning to religion. It imposes a political test on religion, as it were — religions are not true or false, but merely useful or dangerous, when it comes to encouraging the civic virtues that are desirable in citizens of a constitutional, democratic republic.

So gimme that old-time “wall” between church and state, beloved of the Southern Baptists of my childhood. America’s religious and civic cultures are truly in crisis if they can’t do without it.

Tomorrow we’ll be hearing lots about the so-called “tea parties” being held in conjunction with tax day. If you follow the festivities on Fox, you’ll be under the impression that the “tea party movement” is a vast grassroots phenomenon on the brink of halting socialism in its tracks and turning governance of the country back over to its rightful, rightwing owners.
In reality, of course, the tea parties aren’t in the least spontaneous, and have been organized, financed and promoted by the usual suspects of hard-core conservatism. That’s why the best place to follow the tea parties is at a new site, www.savetherich.com, devoted to exposing the “astroturf” (i.e., fake grassroots) nature of these events.
Here’s some pertinent info from the site’s “open letter to media”:

The evidence of astroturfing is everywhere:
Corporate lobbyists and their consultants are organizing behind the scenes. Many of the events are being run by staff from think tanks like Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works and American Solutions for Winning the Futures (ASWF) an organization run by former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Fox News is encouraging turnout, sponsoring, and covering “Tea Parties” across the country. They’re coordinating much of the information for organizers on-line. Fox News hosts — Beck, Cavuto, Hannity, Bruce, Van Susteren, Malkin and Gingrich — are featured guests at some of the largest gatherings.
Protesters have no idea what they’re talking about. At Tea Parties that have taken place over the last few days, attendees are more concerned with Obama’s birth certificate than high taxes or government spending. Fringe gun groups, secessionists, anti-immigration activists and neo-Nazis are out in force.
Republican officials are driving turn out. Sen. David Vitter is even sponsoring a bill to honor the protests. At least 12 Republican members of Congress will be featured guests at the Tea Parties. 11 of the 12 Members of Congress attending the events voted against limiting excessive bonuses just two weeks ago.

So buckle in for a day of rage, much of it manufactured.

Seems it’s a good day for some of the odder variety of conservative activists; here are a couple of examples:
In Iowa, it seems (via Steve Benen) that conservatives need a good refresher course in constitutional law, as reflected in the themes of a major rally held In reaction to the recent Iowa Supreme Court ruling striking down the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats sez he’ll issue an executive order overriding the court’s opinion until such time as Iowans get to vote on the issue. Informed that the governor has no such power, Vander Plaats said he’d exercise it anyway, since after all: “Who says the courts get the final say?” Er, well, maybe the Iowa constitution? Maybe Marbury v. Madison?
At the same rally, a bird named Bill Salier, the founder of a right-wing group called Everyday America, and former Iowa chairman for Tom Tancredo’s presidential campaign, suggested that the state’s gay marriage ban remained in effect because it was physically still in the statute books. “Unless some magic eraser came down from the sky, it’s still in the code.” Interesting.
Meanwhile, over in the nation’s capital, anti-abortion activists are having catalyptic fits over Georgetown University’s entirely routine decision to let the President of the United States speak on its campus today. Veteran abortion extremist Randall Terry is leading a protest against Obama’s appearance, and is making unusually explicit reference to the US-Nazi Germany parallels that most Christian Right leaders only hint at:

Georgetown’s attitude seems to be: Germany’s leaders built great roads in the 1930s, they helped save the banks, and they rebuilt the economy. Let’s focus on their economy – not that whole genocide thing.

Here’s guessing that Terry and the other protesters will go particularly wild when (as Tim Fernholz tips us off) Obama talks about the Sermon on the Mount as a model for economic policy in his Georgetown address.