(via another matt) i read matt welch's impressions of yesterday's tea party. it's one of the more interesting accounts because he's observing the event as an outsider, but he also isn't going out of his way to be critical of the people who took part.
welch sums up by saying that he didn't really find any overarching "subtle truth" about the marchers or the movement. but in reading his account the one overarching thing i came away with is that the tea baggers are unfocused. they don't seem to have a specific agenda. there are no concrete policies they are trying to get enacted, they're just pissed off. that's pretty much the impression i got at my tea party experience last spring.
more often than not, demonstrations aren't effective at bringing about real changes. when they do work, it's because they are focused on a specific demand. that's why it was so frustrating for anti-iraq war activists when the "free mumia" and "meat is murder" crowd showed up for their demonstrations in 2003. so what exactly do the tea baggers want? it seems to me that they're all the right's equivalent of the "meat is murder" people. there's no central demand to dilute. the entire message is diluted from the get-go.
i guess they're all vaguely against obama's health care proposal. to the extent they have specific critiques of the health care plan (whether it be a position against "death panels" or a "government takeover of the health care system" or the "government paying for illegal immigrants' health care" or "government paying for abortions") the things they are against are not in the president's actual plan. that makes the protesters extremely easy to ignore. a politician who wants to vote for the bill can look at their signs and think "i'm not doing any of those things by casting a yes vote." by thriving on misinformation, the right has effectively written itself out of the health care policy debate.
