Full Service Astroturf
by digby
It's amazing what having billionaire backing can do for a movement. Here's Adele Stan on the organizing prowess of the Tea Party:Twice in the course of the last two and a half weeks, the right has drawn thousands of its activists to Washington, D.C., a town once known as a liberal's paradise, overtaking the National Mall, and its surrounding restaurants and coffee shops. This weekend features not only FreedomWorks' 9/12 Taxpayer March on Washington and its blogger conference, but a September 11 rally by a more far-right group, Unite in Action, and an organizing conference directed Ralph Reed, the GOP campaign consultant and former Christian Coalition executive director who was implicated (but never charged) in the Jack Abramoff bribery scandal. Two weekends ago, Glenn Beck's rally filled the Mall with as many as 300,000 Tea Partiers. What is the progressive counterpart to these activities? Not much.
She doesn't mention how useful it was for Beck to enlist the preachers in the tea party crusade for this purpose, but getting the churches on board provides a whole other organizing structure.
Maybe this stuff is going on on the progressive side, but if it is I'm unaware of it. As Stan points out, the October 2nd march has the potential to draw a lot of people, but as far as we know, there's none of the attendant training and organizing. And needless to say, we don't have billionaires underwriting the lodging and transportation so people without a lot of extra money can attend.
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