Tea Party

As CNN and other news media report today, conservatives across the country are hosting "tea parties," organized protests against Obama's bailout policies. Of course, their more deliberate appeal to America history via the Boston Tea party is an interesting rhetorical move, especially in that most of use (admittedly myself included) have probably forgotten the more nuanced political conditions that led to that event. Instead, we focus only on "Taxation Without Representation," which today's tea party revelers have sunk into, arguing that their voices aren't being heard.

But I'm infinitely more interested in CNN's assertions that "Conservatives have borrowed a page from Obama's Web-savvy style which he leaned on heavily during the '08 campaign and still uses to push initiatives." Although the revolutionary potential of the Internet has been touted in various circles (with detractions from some critics) for well over a decade now, probably few in those circles thought that conservatives might be the ones to initiate the revolution. Hence the seeming surprise in CNN's coverage. But of course, liberal's protests of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars had been quarantined and censored for years under the Bush administration, so it might just be that the tea partiers are enjoying the first real fruits of digital activism and organization in the post-Bush era--that is, if we're willing to make a distinction between digital activism and political campaigns. If so, then I hope the irony of the situation isn't lost on conservatives.