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September 27, 2010

The Coffee Party Now Embarrasses Media Which Hyped It

Thomas Lifson
The faux "rival" to the tea parties has become an embarrassment to the left and the journalists who hyped it. Last winter, it sounded like such a good idea to the left: gin up a rival to the tea parties and call it The Coffee Party. Pretty standard Astroturf agitprop material -- the kind of thing David Axelrod excelled at when selling his services to Chicago utility Commonwealth Edison (headed back then by Bill Ayers' daddy, Tom Ayers), which needed the appearance of public support for building a new power station.

Purportedly, the whole Coffee Party grew exponentially when an ordinary citizen named Annabel Park posted a Facebook entry calling for a return to "civility." Supposedly, the CP spread like wildfire, with 200,000 "friendings" on Facebook, lickety-split. CBS News asked, "Is the 'Coffee Party' the next big thing?"The Washington Post not only wrote a glowing news report on the CP ("Coffee Party activists say their civic brew's a tastier choice than Tea Party's"), it offered op ed space to Ms. Park to tout her movement.

This was back in the period when the media were flogging the meme that the tea parties were dangerous yahoos, possibly violent, and certainly repellant to all decent, high-minded, calm and thoughtful Americans. Before it became widely known that tea partiers had more education and higher incomes than average Americans. Before hundreds of thousands of them gathered on the Washington Mall and left it spotless afterward, in gross contrast with the aftermath of the Obama inaugural, when litter was everywhere as soon as Hope and Change were realized.

Of course, Ms. Park was a political operative (and former New York Times employee and filmmaker for the Obama campaign), but nobody in the liberal media thought that was in the least important, when hyping the "answer" to the tea parties.

Seven months later, the Coffee Party is a gigantic embarrassment to those who pretended it was a genuine political movement. The CP just had its first-ever national convention, and the national media which were so enthusiastic at its beginning have blacked out the news. P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters reports:

 Perhaps even the MSM was embarrassed by the Coffee Party's current obscurity to the extent that its lasting legacy might well be the performance at their convention of the lamest rap song in history.

What little coverage the supposedly 350 people attending the Coffee Party convention received seems to have been pretty much limited to local media such as the Louisville Courier whose article could do little to hide the navel-gazing aspects of this "movement" moving nowhere:

The Coffee Party USA - which was founded on Facebook and is holding its first national convention in Louisville this weekend - bills itself as a more thoughtful and reasoned alternative to the tea party.

Saturday night the organization held a panel discussion, part of its three-day "Restoring American Democracy" convention, that included bloggers, college professors and communications strategists talking about what they can do to make politics more inclusive. They also discussed how to draw more disenfranchised voters back into the democratic process.

Quite a cross-section there: bloggers, college professors and communications strategists. Ordinary Americans concerned about civility, I guess.

I do give Ms. Park credit for staying in the game, however. She has not yet quit in embarrassment. But then again,  I wonder where the money came from to stage an event in Louisville? Perhaps she is just fulfilling her obligations to funders? I would welcome a public disclosure of Coffee Party finances. So far, we know this, via Mark J.Fitzgibbons:

"The contribution landing page for the Coffee Party says that it partners with Democracyinaction.org, a 501(c)(3) organization, meaning contributions to the latter are tax-deductible.

The About Page for Democracyinaction.org states that it gets funding from Open Society Institute, George Soros's organization."

Meanwhile, the tea parties continue to be a genuine grass roots phenomenon, at first ignored, then demonized by the media. In contrast, the Coffee Party is obviously a top down dud. Which is why the national media wishes it would go away. As it is likely to do when the funds dry up.   

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