Tempest in a Very Small Teapot

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tempest_in_a_very_small_teapot_20100922/

Tempest in a Very Small Teapot
Posted on Sep 22, 2010
By E.J. Dionne, Jr.

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Do the math. For weeks now, our national political conversation has been driven by 86,441 voters and a margin of 5,548 votes. A bit of perspective: When John McCain lost in 2008, he received 59.9 million votes.

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The media have given substantial coverage to tea party rallies and even small demonstrations. But how many people are actually involved in this movement?

Last April, a New York Times/CBS News poll found that 18 percent of Americans identified themselves as supporters of the tea party movement, but slightly less than a fifth of these sympathizers said they had actually attended a tea party rally or meeting. That means just over 3 percent of Americans can be characterized as tea party activists. A more recent poll by Democracy Corps, just before Labor Day, found that 6 percent of voters said they had attended a tea party rally or meeting.

The tea party is not the only small group in history to wield more power than you’d expect from its numbers. In 2008, Barack Obama did very well in party caucuses, which draw many fewer voters than primaries. And it was Lenin who offered the classic definition of a vanguard party as involving “people who make revolutionary activity their profession” in organizations that “must perforce not be very extensive.”

But something is haywire in our media and our politics. Jill Lepore, a Harvard historian whose new book is “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle Over American History,” observed in an interview that there is a “hall of mirrors” effect created by the rise of “niche” opinion media. They magnify small movements into powerhouses while old-fashioned journalism, which is supposed to put such movements in perspective, reacts to the same niche incentives.

There is also the decline of alternative forces in politics. The Republican establishment, such as it is, has long depended far more on big money than on troops in the field. In search of new battalions, GOP leaders stoked the tea party, stood largely mute in the face of its more outrageous untruths about Obama—and now has to defend candidates like O’Donnell and Angle.

And where are the progressives? Sulking is not an alternative to organizing, and weary resignation is the first step toward capitulation. The tea party may be pulling a fast one on the country and the media. But if it has more audacity than everyone else, it will, I am sorry to say, deserve to get away with it.