Astroturf Extremists! (Democrats Build a Tea Party Smear)

John on April 17, 2009 at 10:54 am

The Democrats had two, inter-related messages for America this week. Both were designed to discredit the Tea Party events that took place on Wednesday.

The first claim was that the Tea Parties were not actually grass roots events, but organized from on high by a cabal of conservative lobbyists. The second charge was that people attending the events were fringe extremists. Here’s how it works.

The astroturfing claim started at Think Progress on April 9th:

Despite these attempts to make the “movement” appear organic, the principle organizers of the local events are actually the lobbyist-run think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works. The two groups are heavily staffed and well funded, and are providing all the logistical and public relations work necessary for planning coast-to-coast protests:

– Freedom Works staffers coordinate conference calls among protesters, contacting conservative activists to give them “sign ideas, sample press releases, and a map of events around the country.”

– Freedom Works staffers apparently moved to “take over” the planning of local events in Florida.

– Freedom Works provides how-to guides for delivering a “clear message” to the public and media.

– Freedom Works has several domain addresses — some of them made to look like they were set up by amateurs — to promote the protests.

– Americans for Prosperity is writing press releases and planning the events in New Jersey, Arizona, New Hampshire, Missouri, Kansas, and several other states.

This type of corporate ‘astroturfing‘ is nothing new to either organization…

It sounds plausible if you simply read the summary, however if you take a moment to actually follow the links it’s another story entirely. Let’s go through these:

The first link to a You Tube video of Freedom Works staffers has been mischaracterized. Watch it and you’ll see that the group isn’t taking credit for the Tea Parties, but trying to shape the spontaneous protests into a lasting movement by “providing sign ideas” etc. At one point Brendan Steinhauser from Freedom Works says:

Usually what happens is an organizer from anywhere in the country will contact me and say I’d like to organize a tea party and do something in my city. What we do is help resource them with ideas for signs, locations, for media outreach and we try to give them this sort of list of things to do so that they can make sure that their event is successful. A lot of that just entails paying attention to details like signing up people when they come and sending e-mail reminders and following up with phone calls and things like that. And we’ve seen a lot of success. There are a lot of people out there that have never done this before but they’re having successful events by sort of followign this recipe…Every Friday we have a conferece call…it’s open to anyone planning a tea party in addition to Freedom Works top volunteers around the country.

This isn’t astroturfing it’s bandwagon-jumping. The people organizing these events locally aren’t chosen by Freedom Works, they are self-selected and a lot of them are people who “have never done this before.” The idea that this is a top down event doesn’t follow from this video at all. In fact, Steinhauser goes on to recount a brief history of the Tea Parties:

Well this kinda got started in February as the stimulus plan was being passed by Congress. And you saw…what happened was people started to protest in small groups outside of Barack Obama’s townhall meetings. When he actually signed the stimulus bill in Denver there was a huge protest at the state capitol. And it kind of took on a life of its own after Rick Santelli went on his rant about the mortgage bailout. So you’ve seen a lot of these things happen spontanously and now there’s been an effort to kind of help support the grassroots effort to do this and a lot of groups and bloggers have really stepped up…

But again, Lee Fang at Think Progress heard “conference call” and that was the story. Based on that and in contradiction of everything else being said here, he’s painting this as astroturf.

I have no idea what the second bullet point is about. It links to a list of 10 helpful ideas for people holding tea parties. There’s nothing about taking over events in Florida and it doesn’t sound like astroturfing anyway. It’s ten ideas for making your event a success and includes things like bring a sign up sheet and contact local bloggers. There’s no evidence that Freedom Works is paying people to do these things only offering tips on how to make their events successful. What exactly is top-down about this?

Bullet point three is the same page linked in bullet point two. It apparently is intended to refer to item number five which says “Write a press release.” And that’s it.

Next bullet point, Freedom Works set up three websites. The first one is to sell T-shirts and links directly to the main site. Capitalizing…definitely, but astroturfing? The third site is one Fang describes as made to look amateur. But again, the front page has a prominent link directly to Freedom Works own site. If this is intended to be deceitful in some way, I’m not seeing it.

By Sunday Paul Krugman of the NY Times devoted his entire column to a tirade about the Tea Parties. I’ve annotated his text below. Note the new angle he’s pushing in addition to the astroturf claim.

[L]ook at the “tea parties” that have been held in a number of places already, and will be held across the country on Wednesday. These parties…have been the subject of considerable mockery, and rightly so.

…President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism…Bizarre. [Right-wing extremism]…Remember when Karl Rove declared that liberals wanted to offer “therapy and understanding” to the 9/11 terrorists? [Right-wing extremism]

Then there are the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, [RW Extremism] which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. [RW Extremism] Crazy stuff — but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were murderers… [RW Extremism]

Going back to those tea parties…denunciations of evolution that have emerged at some of the parties. [RW Extremism]

Last but not least: it turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader[Astroturfing] , and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. [Astroturfing] And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News. [Astroturfing]

The claim about Freedon Works comes directly from Think Progress. The claim about Fox News comes from Media Matters.

On Tuesday of this week, Talking Points Memo had a piece titled “Freedomworks’ long history of teabagging” which claims that Freedom Works originally suggested an event to a local Florida organizer by e-mail. The piece also alleges that robocalls were used to build support. Even so, they don’t call it outright astroturfing but label it something “in between.”

The same week all this was happening, a talk show host and the Washington Times got hold of a report issued by homeland security warning about the rise of “right-wing extremists.” The first press account came one day before the Tea Party protests.

Then on Tea Party day, April 15th, Nancy Pelosi did an interview saying:

This [tea party] initiative is funded by the high end. We call call it astroturf, it’s not really a grassroots movement. It’s astroturf by some of the wealthiest people in America to keep the focus on tax cuts for the rich instead of for the great middle class.”

Also on Wednesday, a reporter for CNN went through a Tea Party crowd and picked out the most extreme sign to highlight on air. She then got into a shouting match on the air claiming that the Tea Parties were sponsored by Fox News. So we have extremism and astroturfing being charged on CNN.

On Thursday, the Financial Times had a piece of analysis of bank bailouts which contained these conspicuous paragraphs:

[T]he mood music is getting steadily uglier. On Wednesday, fringe Republican groups entertained the country with a collection of “tea parties”, protesting at tax increases. The fact that Mr Obama is cutting taxes for the large majority of Americans, albeit by small amounts, did not damp their sense of outrage.

The fact, also, that this “grassroots” protest was heavily sponsored by Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s “fair and balanced” channel (meaning that it was, in fact, an “Astroturf” rather than a “grassroots” event) should not remove its underlying message. Most Americans – Democrats included – detest bailing out Wall Street. Whose side is Mr Obama on, they wonder: the banks’ or the public’s?

There are those same two points again. It’s almost like…I don’t know…like someone sent out a memo or something.

Tying it all together is this Roll Call report  (by way of the Weekly Standard):

Other House Democratic leaders took a different tack: One senior aide has been circulating a document to the media that debunks the effort as one driven by corporate lobbyists and attended by neo-Nazis…

In addition, the tea parties are “not really all about average citizens,” the document continues, saying neo-Nazis, militias, secessionists and racists are attending them. The tea parties are also not peaceful, since reporters in Cincinnati had to seek “police protection” during one of the events, it states.

This is what you call a smoking gun. A senior Democratic aide circulating talking points to media claiming the Tea Parties are a) astroturf and b) full of right-wing extremists. Suddenly it looks as if all that media coverage parroting the same line is, well…astroturfing. Is it an accident that a DHS report on right-wing extremists broke this week? Maybe.

It’s pretty clear that the framing of Tea Party day as the work of astroturf extremists is a Democratic media invention, likely from the hand of the master himself, David Axelrod. But even if all of this nonsense were true it would beg an obvious question…

When did Democrats fall out of love with community organizers?

Update: Ed at Hot Air has a similar suspicion about the timing of the DHS report. It seems the report was rushed out on April 7th for unknown reasons. As he says “Hmmmm.”

Update 2: David Axelrod adds his voice to the Democratic chorus warning about the “unhealthy” potential of the Tea Parties.

Category: Politics |