[wordup] Something New on the Mall

[Adam Shand]

It's fascinating and somewhat tragic to watch this from outside the  
US.  Certainly whatever pressures which are causing this level of  
anger are especially difficult to fathom from outside America.

Regardless, it's an interesting take on the situation.

Source: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23150

Volume 56, Number 16
October 22, 2009

Something New on the Mall
By Michael Tomasky

We have never seen, at least in the modern history of the United  
States, a right-wing street-protest movement. Conservatives who oppose  
Roe v. Wade march on Washington every January 22, the anniversary of  
that 1973 decision; but aside from that single issue and that single  
day, the American right over recent decades has, until this summer,  
carried out its organizing in a comparatively quiet fashion, via  
mimeograph machine and pamphlet and book and e-mail and text message,  
and left the streets to the left.

So we have something new in our political life—the summer's apoplectic  
and bordering-on-violent town-hall meetings, and the large "9/12"  
rally on Washington's National Mall that drew tens of thousands of  
people to protest America's descent into "socialism" (or "communism,"  
or, occasionally, "Nazism"). How extreme is this movement, and how  
seriously should we take it?

The September 12 rally, the culminating (for now) event of the "Tea  
Party" movement that sprouted to life earlier this year, was organized  
chiefly by FreedomWorks, a conservative lobbying organization founded  
in 1984, and supported by nearly thirty conservative organizations,  
ranging from the well known (Club for Growth, Competitive Enterprise  
Institute) to the obscure (Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights). It  
was also promoted heavily on the Fox News Channel, especially by the  
hard right's new man of the moment, Glenn Beck.

Much of the sentiment on display expressed a genuine fury on the part  
of citizens who believe in limited government and are opposed to the  
bank bailout, the auto bailout, health care reform, the deficit, and  
other policies of the administration. But another kind of anger, less  
respectable, was also expressed, and most of it was directed at one  
person in particular. "Parasite-in-Chief" read one sign, showing  
Barack Obama standing at the presidential lectern. "TREASON" read  
another, the "O" rendered in the familiar Obama campaign poster style,  
with the receding red lines suggesting a horizon. Another maintained  
that "Obammunism Is Communism."

Many placards reproduced the widely circulated image of Obama as the  
Joker character played by Heath Ledger in last year's Batman film The  
Dark Knight. On Pennsylvania Avenue, a group of marchers I was walking  
with spontaneously began chanting "No You Can't!" I did not see any  
overtly racist signs (although a TV reporter showed a poster of a  
largely naked African, and the Joker placards have affinities with old  
Sambo cartoons).

There was also plenty of animus toward Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and  
Ted Kennedy—I saw several attendees carrying a sign that said "Bury  
Obamacare with Kennedy," which had been printed by a group called the  
American Life League, a leading Catholic anti–abortion rights group.  
Its motto is "From Creation to Natural Death," and its president wrote  
recently that the fact that the "pro-abort" Kennedy received a  
Catholic burial was "a total, absolute insult to Christ the Lord" that  
went "beyond anything I have witnessed in my more than 65 years of  
life."[1]

There were many signs devoted to the idea of purging Congress, and not  
a few marchers carrying brooms, symbolizing the desire to sweep clean  
the halls of the Capitol. Across from the National Archives Building—a  
nine iron away from the revered documents we read so differently—I ran  
into (actually, he, and his baby stroller, almost ran into me) Grover  
Norquist, the influential head of Americans for Tax Reform, the  
conservative lobbying and advocacy group and one of the cosponsors of  
the march. I've interviewed the accessible Norquist several times. I'd  
never seen him giddy, as he was while describing to me the growth of  
these protests since a smattering of anti-tax marches last spring. He  
was like an alumnus just before kickoff at the homecoming game. He  
reluctantly agreed that health care reform will probably pass:  
"They've got the votes to do something," he said. "The question is how  
damaging it is."

But he quickly regained his optimism—he argued that once there's a  
final, written-down bill, "you have a bigger target, not a smaller  
target," and he moved to an assessment of next year's elections:  
"They've already given us enough votes to lose twenty to forty House  
seats," he told me.

id-term election predictions seem absurdly premature. By next fall,  
the economy could well be growing at a good pace (Alan Greenspan says  
it will happen this year), unemployment could be decreasing, and Obama  
could be back near a 60 percent approval rating. What is not  
hypothetical is that the Tea Party movement has materialized, to those  
who don't monitor conservative Web sites and media outlets, seemingly  
out of nowhere, with an intensity no one would have predicted three  
months ago (certainly the White House did not). It does not represent  
a majority of the country, or probably anything close to a majority.  
Perhaps, based on certain indicators—Sarah Palin's popularity, George  
W. Bush's at the very end, the percentages in polls that strongly  
disapprove of Obama's leadership—we can conclude that its followers  
make up 25 or so percent of the electorate.

But we kid ourselves if we think they are not capable of broader  
impact. We've seen it already: the degree to which self-identified  
independent voters flipped on health care over the summer from support  
to opposition, in part because of the toxic town-hall protests, was  
astonishing. One oft-quoted poll from mid-August by USA Today found  
that independents said, by 35 to 16 percent, that they had become more  
sympathetic to the town-hall protesters.[2] (Obama regained some  
ground among independents after his September 9 address to Congress.)

This movement could flame out, and the September 12 march be  
forgotten. It's worth recalling that the AFL-CIO organized a march on  
the mall eight months into Ronald Reagan's first term that drew  
250,000 people, three or four times the September 12 group's total.  
That movement had little impact on the course of subsequent events.

This conservative protest movement, though, has three powerful forces  
supporting it: bottomless amounts of corporate money; an ideologically  
dedicated press, radio, and cable television apparatus eager to tout  
its existence; and elected officials who are willing to embrace it  
publicly and whose votes in support of the movement's positions can be  
absolutely relied upon. The 1981 marchers and all the left-leaning  
protest movements with which we've been familiar over the years—and  
that serve in our minds as the models for street protests and  
political rallies—have typically had none of this kind of support. For  
the foreseeable future, what we witnessed on September 12, and over  
the summer at the town-hall events, is likely to be a permanent  
feature of the political landscape.

he Tea Party movement started in February, during the debates over the  
stimulus bill and the bank bailout. The right-wing blogger Michelle  
Malkin was among the early agitators for protest. But all remained  
inchoate until February 19, when CNBC correspondent Rick Santelli  
delivered what has become famous in some circles as the "Santelli  
rant." Santelli is a former Chicago trader who joined CNBC in 1999.  
During one of his regular reports from the floor of the Chicago Board  
of Trade, reacting to an earlier on-air segment about the Obama  
administration's $75 billion plan to help several million homeowners  
avoid foreclosure, Santelli—who called himself an "Ayn Rander"—erupted:

The government is promoting bad behavior.... I'll tell you what, I  
have an idea.
You know, the new administration's big on computers and technology—how  
about this, President and new administration? Why don't you put up a  
Web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if  
we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages; or would we like to  
at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to  
people that might have a chance to actually prosper down the road, and  
reward people that could carry the water instead of drink the water?
As he carried on, the traders who normally serve only as his backdrop  
began to turn, face him, and cheer. He asked them how many of them  
"want to pay for your neighbors' mortgage that has an extra bathroom  
and can't pay their bills?" They booed loudly—not at him, but at the  
idea. He announced plans for a "Chicago Tea Party" for July (whether  
he did this spontaneously or not is an interesting question[3]). Thus  
was born the current grassroots movement, on a stock-trading floor  
("This is America!" he roared at one point, gesturing toward the  
traders around him as if they were representative of average folk) and  
animated by anger at "the losers" and their mortgages.

Within hours, Web sites started popping up. FreedomWorks, a  
conservative lobbying organization founded in 1984 with a current  
budget of undisclosed millions (its most recent report to the IRS  
covers 2007), helped support this activity from the start. It is  
funded in part by Steve Forbes and headed by former Republican  
Congressman Dick Armey of Texas, who was a featured speaker at the  
September 12 rally. FreedomWorks has a history of setting up  
"astroturf" groups, so named because they resemble grassroots  
organizations but in fact have significant hidden corporate backing,  
on a range of issues.

While President Bush was trying to promote Social Security  
privatization, a woman in Iowa who identified herself as a "single  
mom" won a coveted spot on the stage from which she praised Bush's  
plan. It was later revealed that she was FreedomWorks's Iowa state  
director. She had spent the previous two years as spokeswoman for  
something called For Our Grandchildren, a pro-privatization group that  
is itself, according to SourceWatch, the nonprofit monitoring Web  
site, an offshoot of another group, the American Institute for Full  
Employment (an outfit advocating reform of welfare that was funded  
initially by a multimillionaire in Klamath Falls, Oregon, who made his  
fortune in doors, windows, and millwork).

mention all this because it suggests how astroturfing works. An  
existing nonprofit group sets up an ad hoc one devoted to a particular  
cause or idea. It is given an otherwise good-sounding name, and is  
presented as having sprung up spontaneously. But always, there is  
corporate money behind it, donated by rich conservatives who have the  
sense to see that an image of broad populist anger will be more  
convincing to the unpersuaded (and to the press) than an image of a  
corporate titan pursuing a narrow and naked interest.

With respect to the Tea Parties and especially the summer's town-hall  
meetings, a key corporate titan appears to be Koch Industries of  
Wichita, Kansas. Fred Koch (pronounced "coke") founded the company in  
1940 as an oil business but it has expanded into natural gas,  
pharmaceuticals, fertilizer, and many other areas. He helped create  
the John Birch Society in the late 1950s and died in 1967. His two  
sons who run the business now, David and Charles, have foundations  
that donate millions to conservative and libertarian causes and  
groups, including notably the Cato Institute. One Koch-funded group  
used to be called Citizens for a Sound Economy. It became Americans  
for Prosperity (AFP) in 2003, a group that has advocated limited  
government and opposed climate change legislation. Earlier this year,  
Americans for Prosperity launched a Web site called Patients United  
Now, which ran frightening television ads opposing health care reform  
(showing, for example, a Canadian woman who supposedly couldn't get  
treatment for a brain tumor in her native country[4]). According to  
the liberal Web site ThinkProgress, the AFP helped distribute signs  
and talking points at a town-hall event hosted by Virginia Congressman  
Tom Perriello.

Think Progress is one of three organizations that did extensive  
reporting over the summer on how the town halls were organized. Media  
Matters for America, the group run by David Brock, set up a  
comprehensive Web site, now publicly available, that tracks the  
complex relationships between donors, nonprofit groups, and the  
activist organizations to which they funnel money.[5] Campaign for  
America's Future, the labor-funded advocacy group that's been trying  
to keep a public option in the final health care bill, produced a  
helpful flow chart laying out the connections.[6]

The sources of money can be hard to track. These are mainly 501(c)4  
groups, which are allowed to lobby and engage in political activity.  
They are like 501(c)3 groups, which are supposed to be purely  
educational, in that groups in both categories do not pay federal  
taxes. However, (c)3 donations are tax-deductible for the donor, while  
(c)4 gifts are not. The groups have to file annual reports listing  
major donors, but the fines for late filing are so light that many  
groups prefer to pay the fines, or file extensions, thus putting off  
disclosure for months or years.

It isn't just conservative (c)4 groups that backed the town halls.  
America's Health Insurance Plans, or AHIP, is the enormous lobbying  
organization for private health insurance companies headed by Karen  
Ignagni, who makes frequent television appearances discussing health  
care. According to ThinkProgress's Lee Fang, AHIP mobilized 50,000 of  
its employees to attend town-hall meetings and otherwise lobby against  
the inclusion of a public health insurance option in the reform.[7]  
AHIP's effort was coordinated by Democracy Data & Communications  
(DDC), which has helped various corporate clients set up front groups.  
DDC is headed by B.R. McConnon, who was once an employee of the Koch- 
funded Citizens for a Sound Economy.

Not everything is hidden under such layers. The Web site for the  
September 12 march, for example, lists its sponsors on its home page  
(first among them: FreedomWorks Foundation). And the high-powered  
operations of these groups do not mean that none of the opposition to  
Obama's policies is genuine and spontaneous. Liberal and conservative  
bloggers have sparred over this question, the former tending to  
overstate the control that astroturf groups have over people, the  
latter tending to deny it completely.

The argument over spontaneity versus coordination largely misses the  
point, which is the way that a loose network of groups sustains and  
encourages opposition to the administration and gives the movement  
currency and power it would not otherwise have. Money is the ultimate  
lubricant of politics, and the potential money supply for Tea Parties  
and other astroturf contributions is virtually limitless. In this  
case, though, it may not be the most important force contributing to  
the rise of this movement.

any signs at the march were critical of the press. The universal view  
among these folks is that the country's major media outlets are  
virtually state-controlled and obedient to Obama's every wish. They  
have tuned out NBC, CBS, CNN, and others completely. This, too, is a  
new thing: millions of Americans who get their "news" only from  
outlets that will tell them exactly what they want to hear.

Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel are by now familiar even to  
people who never listen to or watch them. But if you don't do so, you  
have no idea the extent to which they very directly fuel talk of  
socialism, and twist and sometimes invent information, and create  
scandals that keep their listeners agitated. To liberals, and to non- 
ideological Americans who might have heard of him, Cass Sunstein is a  
highly regarded Harvard law professor who might someday be a plausible  
Supreme Court nominee and who, if anything, is not a lockstep liberal  
on such matters as civil liberties. To consumers of the right-wing  
mass media, however, Sunstein is nothing short of a nut, who believes  
that meat-eating and hunting should be banned, that pets should be  
able to sue their owners, and that the government should order that  
organs be ripped fresh from the bodies of people who die in emergency  
rooms.

These spurious charges are based largely on selective and distorted  
quotations from his writings and in any case have nothing to do with  
the White House job to which he was nominated. But the United States  
Senate has taken notice of them. Sunstein's nomination by Obama to  
head the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, announced  
January 8, was held up by Republicans for months. On September 9, he  
finally—but just barely—survived a cloture vote to allow his  
confirmation to proceed. He was confirmed the next day by a vote of 57– 
40, with just five Republican votes.

The charge against Sunstein was led by Fox's Glenn Beck, who now, even  
more than Limbaugh, is the guru of this new right wing. Beck, famous  
for saying that Obama is a "racist" with "a deep-seated hatred for  
white people or white culture," now has (on some nights anyway) more  
than three million viewers and has surpassed Bill O'Reilly as the  
leader among cable news hosts.[8] Beck has been crusading against  
Obama's "czars"—the appointees who don't require Senate confirmation.  
Obama is hardly the first president to name such officials—the  
practice dates to the 1940s and presidents of both parties have named  
them. And many of them are just subcabinet-level appointees whom the  
press—or Beck himself—happens to have labeled czars. For example,  
Dennis Blair is the director of national intelligence. But he's also  
the "intelligence czar," adding to the supposedly terrifying total of  
unaccountable, unconstitutional radicals infiltrating the government.

The September 12 marchers carried many a placard denouncing the czars,  
urging Obama to take them back to Russia and so on. "Russia," of  
course, means "communistic," which the czars, of course, were not. But  
all that matters is that the conservative base be kept in an excitable  
state and that Obama suffer political defeats, as he did when Beck was  
able to claim the scalp of Van Jones, the "green jobs czar" who  
resigned in September after it was revealed that he'd signed a  
petition with language suggesting that members of the Bush  
administration may have known that the September 11 attacks were  
impending and didn't stop them.

These right-wing outlets—which include "news" Web sites like Newsmax  
and World Net Daily, the latter affiliated with Jerome Corsi, a writer  
connected with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—create a world in which  
their consumers have a reality presented to them that is completely at  
odds with the reality the rest of us live in. Their coverage of the  
town halls helped drive the way those meetings were presented in other  
media. E.J. Dionne reported in The Washington Post that North Carolina  
Democratic Congressman David Price was told by a stringer for a  
television network: "Your meeting doesn't get covered unless it blows  
up."[9]

he third source of support for this movement is Republican elected  
officials. Thanks in part to millions of dollars of donations to  
Republican senators like Charles Grassley and Mike Enzi, the Tea Party  
movement can count on virtually every Republican in Congress to vote  
with it on major bills. Only Maine Senator Olympia Snowe seems not to  
bother with them much, which is one reason why she might yet vote with  
the Democrats on health care. (She has made her opposition to the  
public option clear, but she did on September 17 sign a letter with  
three Democrats indicating that she might back a bill without one.)  
This, again, is a situation without precedent. When the labor or anti– 
Vietnam War or civil rights movements held their marches, they knew  
they still faced a battle within Congress to win over a broad majority  
of Democrats. Within today's congressional Republican Party there is  
little or no such tension.

This is hardly surprising, given the increasing homogeneity of the GOP  
in recent decades, as most moderates from New England and elsewhere  
have left the party. But it is striking to see elected officials  
staying silent in the face of extremism or even egging it on, as are  
the eleven Republican cosponsors of a House bill that would require  
future presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates  
when they file their statements of candidacy, an obvious sop to the so- 
called "birther" movement whose adherents claim that Obama is not an  
American citizen. Instead of elected officials acting as a sort of  
restraining ego to the activists, everyone here shares one big id.

There is, of course, one last trait all these people have in common.  
They, or at least 98 percent of those I saw on the mall on September  
12, are white. It's difficult to say what part race plays in their  
anger. But because they are so overwhelmingly white, everything these  
folks say about "their" country being taken away from them has an  
inevitable racial overtone. Would this movement have started if, say,  
Hillary Clinton or John Edwards were president? I think it probably  
would have—Lord knows, there are few Hillary Clinton admirers among  
these groups. And I think it does have ideological rather than racial  
roots and causes. But it seems unlikely that it would have emerged  
with quite this ferocity—unlikely, for example, that the presence of a  
President Edwards would have led to people carrying guns to  
presidential speeches, as happened when Obama spoke to veterans in  
Phoenix this summer. And there seemed a racial angle, too, in the  
anger that exploded last spring about having to pay for "losers'"  
mortgages.

We can't measure this, and I'm not sure what good it would do us to  
know even if we could. What we do know is that this movement is backed  
by corporate millions, powerful media organizations, such as Fox News,  
and votes in Congress, and that it will be around for quite some time,  
advancing new fake scandals and lies. The next phase in all this, if  
health care passes, might well be "nullification" lawsuits or  
resolutions in states that don't want to have to implement Obama's  
reform.

There's a name for the followers of this movement, too—the "tenthers,"  
as in the Tenth Amendment, which reserves unenumerated rights to the  
states. So far this year, thirty-seven states have introduced so- 
called "sovereignty resolutions," and North Dakota, South Dakota,  
Idaho, Alaska, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Tennessee have passed them.  
South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint, Minnesota Congresswoman Michele  
Bachmann, and Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty have all intimated that  
if Obama's health care plan is enacted, nullification may be the best  
course of action. If they choose it, I'm sure there will be another  
march.

—September 24, 2009

Notes

[1]The essay, by ALL President Judie Brown, was posted on the Web site LifeSiteNews.com 
  on September 1, 2009.

[2]See Susan Page, "Poll: Health Care Views Take Sympathetic Tilt,"  
USA Today, August 13, 2009.

[3]An article on Playboy's Web site by Mark Ames and Yasha Levine  
suggested that Santelli's performance was "a carefully planned  
trigger" for the Tea Parties. CNBC threatened libel, and  
Playboyremoved the article from its site. Santelli issued a statement  
after that piece appeared denying any affiliation with Tea Party  
movements, swearing that he had no political agenda, and even saying  
he hoped that Obama would succeed in passing his stimulus bill.

[4]Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell picked up on the story of  
this woman, Shona Holmes, giving it wide circulation. A Canadian  
newspaper reported later that while she was indeed told under the  
Canadian system to wait months for treatment and chose to go to the  
Mayo Clinic for quicker treatment, she did not in fact have a brain  
tumor, but something called a Rathke's Cleft Cyst, which is benign.  
See Julie Mason, "A Reality Check on a Reality Check," The Ottawa  
Citizen, July 29, 2009.

[5]See www.mediamattersaction.org/transparency.

[6]See Sarah Shive, "Who's Paying to Kill Health Reform?," at CAF's  
Web site, www.ourfuture.org.

[7]See Lee Fang, "Health Insurance Lobby's Stealth Astroturf Campaign  
Revealed!," August 28, 2009, at www.thinkprogress.org.

[8]Fox is way ahead of its competitors. It averages around three  
million nightly viewers; MSNBC, around 1.1 million; CNN, around  
900,000. See tvbythenumbers.com.

[9]See E.J. Dionne Jr., "The Real Town Hall Story," The Washington  
Post, September 3, 2009.