Censored 2012 (59 page)

Participation at rallies that occurred in the Chicago area throughout the spring through fall of 2010 were sparsely attended, with little evidence of grassroots local organizing. Consistent with the trend for national rallies, actual attendance at major events was usually a tiny fraction of the 4 percent of Americans nationally who claimed to be supporters of the “movement.” Of those who did turn out, there was little evidence of the sort of activist behavior that is the hallmark of social movements. There was almost no leafleting and pamphleteering. Political speaker lists and tabling (the little of it that existed) were dominated by Republican Party activists and candidates who were running for office in the midterms. Rally turnout was hardly representative of the surrounding areas’ demographics. In the city of Chicago, for example, only a small handful of African American or Hispanic demonstrators turned out for a city that retains a minority-majority status.

In the February demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, against Scott Walker, Tea Party turnouts were also extremely low, despite the
“movement” highlighting the tremendous importance of the city’s struggle for their conservative cause. Tea Party rallies were rarely visible over a few-week period in which tens of thousands of pro-union supporters were turning out daily. Tea Partiers were visibly the odd-man-out in a state in which a strong majority of citizens opposed Walker’s attempt to destroy union organizing and remove collective bargaining rights.
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Even among the few supporters of Walker’s draconian measures, few could be bothered enough to publicly turn out. On the one day in February in which the Tea Party promised a “mass turnout,” conservative protestors were dwarfed by a sea of union supporters, with less than 1,000 Tea Partiers demonstrating alongside more than 100,000 Walker opponents.
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In my repeated visits to Madison to observe and participate in the labor protests, there were literally no Tea Partiers to be seen, despite the calls of national leaders for mass turnouts to show solidarity with Walker and state Republicans.

Tea Party national organizing in the spring of 2011 was also anemic at best. The April 15 “Tax Day” rallies came and went across the country
without
the mass coverage or seemingly larger turnouts showcased in many local chapters. Turnout in Madison of Tea Partiers “in solidarity” with Governor Walker was meager, despite the calls of regional and national Tea Party leaders for a mass showing. When the “I Stand with Scott Walker Rally” finally materialized on February 19, strong evidence of Astroturfing was evident. Fox News creations such as Andrew Breitbart and “Joe the Plumber” dominated the lineup, highlighting the top-down, mediated nature of the “movement.”

Organizing in preparation for the February 19 event was dominated by national groups with extensive ties to the Republican Party and corporate interests. “American Majority,” the group that played a lead role in organizing the event, is a creation of Ned Ryun, a former speech-writer for George W. Bush and the son of former Republican Congressional Representative Jim Ryun. The Ryun family shares a long history of Republican activism, with Ned Ryun’s brother serving as the deputy director of the Republican National Committee in 2004 and also working for the Tea Party-affiliated American Majority. The organization receives most of its funding from the Sam Adam’s Alliance, a group that is supported by the billionaire Koch brothers, who have
become notorious for funding right-wing Astroturf groups that front as “grassroots,” but in reality strongly serve corporate interests.
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On-the-ground observation of the few Tea Party organizational meetings taking place throughout Chicago consistently found a lack of interest in grassroots activism. Tea Party meetings for cities with regular meetings were scarcely attended by more than a handful of “activists,” and when larger numbers did appear, few indicated a willingness to engage in activism beyond simply appearing for the meeting. Local chapter leaders and members regularly expressed frustration with the lack of turnout, while explaining that they had turned to an alternative strategy to gather larger numbers for rallies: “the email blast.”
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Local chapter leaders would rely on visitors to their local websites, rather than on those attending meetings, to turnout at strategically planned rallies. This approach provided these leaders with effective PR opportunities, since rallies boasted far larger numbers of people than were actually involved in planning activities or organizing. This failure to organize, however, was inconsequential in the end. Journalists were intent on certifying these rallies as proof of “mass organizing,” and the media megaphone was already succeeding in creating the false impression that the Tea Party was a genuine mass movement.

In my writings covering the Tea Party, I spent significant time tracing the role of wealthy business leaders and Republican operatives in organizing Tea Party rallies across the country. While individual stories have appeared (at times regularly) in reporting about the Tea Party as influenced by the Koch brothers and other wealthy industrialists and business elites, suggestions that the Tea Party is Astroturf are few and far between. In analyzing national network television, and print coverage throughout 2009 and 2010, my comprehensive analysis of the
Lexis Nexis
database found that references to the Tea Party as a “movement” radically outnumbered suggestions that it was “Astroturf” in origin. Furthermore, the Tea Party was far more regularly and undeservingly certified as a mass movement than other legitimate social movements that did boast mass turnouts, but were heavily critical of the political-economic status
quo. Using
Lexis Nexis
, I collected data on the two-week periods immediately before and after national rallies of the Tea Party (for a total of one month), in comparison to similar periods covering major protests related to the antiwar movement, the anticorporate globalization movement, and the pro-choice movement. References to the Tea Party as a “movement” outnumbered similar references to these other movements by ratios of between two to 100:1. The most extreme example was the 2003 antiwar protests across the United States and the world. While those demonstrations attracted upwards of ten million people, the Tea Party rallies in April 2010 attracted up to one hundred thousand nationwide (perhaps less), according to available evidence.
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Despite the massive imbalance in participation levels, the Tea Party was referenced twice as often as a “social movement,” compared to the anti-Iraq war rallies, within the same periods of time.

Central to the mass media’s mythic Tea Party narrative is the notion that the group is fiercely antiestablishment and nonpartisan. Reports from the
New York Times
in early 2010 framed the Tea Party’s upcoming national convention as a “coming together” of the Tea Party’s “diffuse,” or as “grassroots groups” that express fierce “antigovernment sentiments.” This depiction of the group was endemic within reporting (as documented above) which regularly referred to the Tea Party as a mass movement, rather than a partisan affair.
The New York Times
’ “Tea Party outsider” narrative was wildly popular throughout the rest of the mass media.
Time
magazine, for example, reacted to the Tea Party’s rise by describing it as outside of electoral politics: it “is not a political party … and maybe never will be. Rejecting the idea—widely held by Democrats—that a government of brainy people can solve thorny problems through complex legislation, the Tea Party finds its strongest spirit among conservative Republicans.”
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Fox
agreed, reporting that the group was deeply outside of Republican-politics-as-usual: “Anything could happen from now [November 2010] until the presidential election in 2012, and it remains to be seen whether a movement that prides itself on being outside the establishment will front its own Tea Party presidential candidate, revolutionize the Republican
Party or merely fade back into the background. Leading Tea Partiers vowed to keep up the pressure on their favored new lawmakers to fight a Washington establishment they say is broken and doesn’t work for the best interests of the American people.”
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In addition to the anecdotal evidence above, journalists framed the Tea Party “movement” as an outsider force on a systematic level. In the four months prior to the 2010 midterm elections, the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
ran 135 and 136 stories respectively, or an average of 45 per month, referring to the Tea Party as a “social movement.” MSNBC and Fox, as respective leaders of the Left and Right wings of the media, ran 137 and 167 stories respectively, or 46 and 56 stories per month. During the same period, stories referencing the Tea Party in relation to the “Republican establishment” appeared in 98 and 159 stories in the
New York Times
and the
Washington Post
(an average of 33 and 53 stories per month), and 88 and 90 stories at MSNBC and Fox (29 and 30 stories per month). In short, depictions of the Tea Party “movement” as an insurgent force were standard operating procedure throughout the entire spectrum of the establishment press.

Some basic problems emerge with regard to the dominant media narrative. The Tea Party as an “outsider” depiction is only convincing if one actively ignores the mountain of evidence suggesting that the Tea Party has long been seen as an integral part of Republican politics, rather than an independent political force. The major symbolic leaders of the group, for example, include Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, and Dick Armey, all long-time Republicans who have held (or currently hold) major positions within the party. One would also need to ignore the fact that major Tea Party organizations, including Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party Express, American Majority, Freedom Works, and the Tea Party Caucus (in the House of Representatives), are all led by conservative activists with long histories of actively collaborating with Republican leaders. Finally, one would also need to discount national polling findings, which suggest that more than three-fourths of Tea Party supporters either consider themselves Republicans, lean toward the Republican Party, or regularly vote Republican.
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While statistical analysis suggests that these individuals do represent the most conservative elements of the Republican Party,
they are not far out of step ideologically with the rest of the party, which numerous studies demonstrate has been moving toward the radical Right for a number of decades.
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There is a serious discrepancy between the Tea Party “outsider” rhetoric and the reality that the Tea Party phenomenon is heavily integrated into Republican politics. This finding, however, was consistently ignored in reports following the November 2010 midterm elections. A
Lexis Nexis
search reveals that, in the two months prior to the November 2 elections and in the week following the elections (from September 1 through November 7, 2010), the Tea Party was described as at least one of the following: “revolt” or “rebellion” against the political establishment, an “insurgent” or comprising an “insurgency” against Washington politics, as “grassroots,” and as a “movement” in 135 pieces from the
New York Times
(60 a month), 120 in the
Washington Post
(53 a month), in 127 MSNBC programs (56 a month), and 149 Fox stories (62 a month). Another study of media coverage found that reporting on the Tea Party as outside of the “Republican establishment” and as a “social movement” was a regular occurrence in the run-up to and immediately following the midterms. Such references appeared in dozens of articles and stories in the variety of news outlets examined above.
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In short, few people in the mass media took seriously the reality that the Tea Party is largely a Republican phenomenon.

Tea Party supporters will dispute the findings above, suggesting that while the Tea Party is now a part of the Republican Party, it is dedicated to promoting radical change from within. There is little merit to such claims, which are endlessly repeated throughout the mass media. What this argument conveniently neglects is that the Congressional Tea Party Caucuses’ members are an integral part of the inner-Washington political circle. Members of the sizable “Tea Party caucus” in the House of Representatives have received massive funding from, and granted significant concessions to the very corporate banking and finance interests that succeeding in destroying the US economy. They benefit from serious campaign contributions from the health care interests that benefitted from the expansion of market-based care
under Obama—this while working to ensure that any reforms passed by the Democrats would not go too far in challenging the for-profit health system. Furthermore, most of these caucus members voted for the very same deregulatory acts that helped create the economic crisis. Far from rebelling against Wall Street, these individuals voted in favor of deregulating the destructive derivatives that wreaked havoc on financial markets, and supported the reregulation of the national banking system in order to allow a select few corporations to become “too big to fail” by buying up smaller banks in the merger-mania that followed the repeal of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999.

Newcomer Tea Partiers do not fare much better with regard to their alleged independence from Wall Street. Statistically speaking, newly elected Tea Partiers in Congress were just as likely, and at times more likely, to rely on business interests as their top donors when compared to previous Tea Party Caucus members. More specifically, new Tea Partiers were just as likely as previous caucus members to rely on campaign contributions from the real estate, finance, banking, and securities and investment industries.
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That these groups were instrumental in the 2008 economic meltdown, yet have served as major supporters for newly elected Tea Partiers, is a fact overwhelmingly ignored in popular media commentary. This finding goes against the entire narrative of the Tea Party as a fresh, rebellious force in Washington politics; hence it is ignored by the media and political powers that be.