American politics
Democracy in America

The Mad Tea Party

The stirrings of an anti-government revolt

FOR the record, it took one month for President Obama to generate protests. In Denver, when the president signed the economic stimulus package into law, he was greeted (in a non-literal sense, as they were at a different building) by a few hundred protesters egged on by talk radio and Michelle Malkin, the conservative columnist and TV host. In Mesa, Arizona, protesters raised hell about a multi-billion-dollar plan to keep homeowners with bad mortgages from losing their homes. After a reporter for the business network CNBC said that the mortgage plan made him angry enough to "have a Chicago Tea Party", that was it: these protest were now "tea parties", tributes to the Boston Harbour tax protest of 1773.

As protests go, these aren't very spontaneous. The newly-launched New American Tea Party site is passing out talking points and marching orders for people who want to join a movement supported by the major anti-tax Washington think tanks.

This is all about image. If we don’t present the media with a professional, organized and, unfortunately, scripted image, they are going to make their own, and it won’t be favorable.

Liberal critics such as Roy Edroso are having fun with this. In a wrap-up of the protests so far, and their small numbers, Mr Edroso mentioned an Irish rally in which labour unions got 100,000 people to hit the streets. But historians of the Great Depression know that citizen anti-government movements can accomplish great things. They just need to stop waving signs and start avoiding their taxes.

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