Liberal Doughboys Afraid of Tea Parties

posted at 10:46 pm on April 12, 2009 by Legal Insurrection

Liberal bloggers and media groups can’t get the Tea Party phenomenon out of their heads. It wasn’t supposed to be this way, to them. Ordinary people getting together to protest against the liberal establishment. There is a cognitive disconnect. There must be a plot; the vast right-wing conspiracy at work.

So true to form, Media Matters sounded the horn that this was not a real protest, it’s a Fox News segment. Kind of a made for T.V. reality show, with a cast of tens of thousands. Think Progress joined in with “Spontaneous Uprising? Corporate Lobbyists Helping To Orchestrate Radical Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests.”

And the netroot blogosphere heard the call. FireDogLake proprietor Jane Hamsher posted “What Part of ‘FNC TAX DAY TEA PARTIES’ Don’t You Understand?” Hamsher also promoted “citizen-organized protests” which were unlike the “Fox-organized” Tea Parties; I guess she didn’t catch the irony of promoting counter-protests to protest other people promoting protests. Anyway, almost no one showed up for the counter-protests.

Well-known blogger Oliver Willis protested that the Tea Parties are not really “Grassroots.” Willis works for Media Matters, but blogs under his own name. Yet another irony lost, a blogger who works for a media organization promoting opposition to a protest movement because the protest movement is promoted by a media organization.

Despite the attempts to paint the Tea Parties as Fox-created, the netroots are coming to grips with reality, as witnessed by this defeatist post from Washington Monthly, which cites Willis as authority without noting Willis’ connection to Media Matters (emphasis mine):

These right-wing events aren’t just coming together naturally; they’re the product of Fox News and corporate lobbyists. This is practically a textbook example of “astroturf.” That Glenn Beck is charging $500 a plate to have lunch with him, to help subsidize the effort, only helps reinforce the larger dynamic.

Conservatives too often think, “We’ll get some money together, deliver a right-wing message, and the grassroots will come together. It’ll be awesome.” Except, it never is.

This isn’t to say turnout will necessarily be low on Wednesday; I wouldn’t be surprised if far-right voters turned out in substantial numbers.

What is it with Media Matters and its progeny that must attempt to define and silence the Tea Parties? What do they care if people protest, if they are confident in the power of their views.

The answer lies in one of the most ingenious marketing events of all time, the Ben & Jerry’s “What’s the doughboy afraid of?” campaign. In the early 1980s, Ben & Jerry’s was an upstart “premium” ice cream maker in Vermont struggling to get shelf space to compete against Pillsbury’s Haaagen-Daz brand. But Pillsbury, as do many food wholesalers, wasn’t keen on giving a competitor room to grow, so it pressured stores not to give Ben & Jerry’s shelf space.

In response, Ben & Jerry’s hit on a protest theme: “What’s the doughboy afraid of?” The campaign took off, sprouting bumper stickers, t-shirts, and generally great publicity for Ben & Jerry’s. Pillsbury eventually gave in, and Ben & Jerry’s got its shelf space

The doughboy campaign holds several lessons for the Tea Party movement. First, the left fears loss of control. As a really good blog post notes, the left dominates the mainstream media and to a lesser extent, the internet. So the right is moving to Twitter, and now to the streets, to avoid the filtering of its message. The left-wing media machine embodied in Media Matters has trouble dealing with these alternatives, and so it attacks. It seeks to assert its control by framing the protests as contrived, when in fact the opposite is true.

The second lesson is that the more Media Matters attacks the Tea Parties, the stronger the Tea Parties become. Pillsbury learned the hard way that trying to muscle a legitimate brand with a loyal following can backfire. And so it is here; my post Tea Parties Are Sooo Scaaary generated more hits for me from more sources (blogs, posting boards, elsewhere) than almost any other post I have written.

There is a sense that people are fed up with having liberal ideology and politics shoved down their throat, and that Obama’s overly ambitious agenda is a turning point. The movement may not be as organized as some would like, but that is what happens when movements truly start from the ground up, rather than in a community-organizer’s playbook or a media boardroom.

The disparate groups involved, the great variation from location-to-location, and the sometimes disorganized nature of the protests demonstrate the genuine nature of the movement. The fact that some have lent a promotional hand doesn’t take away from this. The mainstream media practically elected Obama through its over-the-top cheerleading coverage and refusal to ask hard questions. And Media Matters and other liberal organizations are extremely well funded in their efforts, far more so than the Tea Party movement. Nothing any conservative organization is doing to help the Tea Parties even comes close.

Getting law-abiding people onto the streets cannot be ginned up by promotion (ask Jane Hamsher). There has to be a true feeling to motivate people who never before have protested to get involved. And that is what frightens Media Matters and others most. Loss of control over the message, so they attack the messengers.

So I ask, “What are the liberal doughboys afraid of?”

Cross-posted at Legal Insurrection

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