Sure, we all like to make fun of the teabaggers. Sure, the content of their protest ranges from stupid and misinformed via plain wrong to outright vile.
But, you have to admit that they have been very effective in getting their message out. I was pointed this: A Method to Their Madness, a piece in the Nation by Gary Younge, that is spot on.
There is a lot of good quotable content in there (do read the whole thing!), but I'll just focus on what he says about their effectiveness vs. ours.
The key quote in this piece is this:
So progressives could be forgiven for branding the right as stupid and crazy. But they would also be wrong. For if this is madness, there is great method in it. It is well organized and well funded. It has proven effective in mobilizing support, creating "controversy" where little exists and disrupting and disorienting whatever national conversation there is. If it is stupid, then what does it say about us, since time and again it manages to outmaneuver the left?
As a former dKos frontpager would say: "Indeed". Every time they have protested, we have mocked them. But the fact remains that they have been more effective than we have been over the last few months.
Sure, today, their attempts to inflate the size of their protest were ridiculous. But, they did get reported on. Again. Every single one of their actions have been reported on. Of course, a big reason for this is that the media is lazy and loves "controversy". They get reported on, while several events that our side organized were not reported on.
However, we also know that this is how the media works. We know that they love shiny objects and "controversy". You need to know how to work the system. The organizers behind the teaparties know how. We haven't done so well at that. Certainly not for lack of effort, and I'm not going to point fingers; there are a lot of people out there who work hard. But, look at the numbers: they had an event of 60,000-70,000 (DC fire dept. estimate) people today. That is a bigger rally than any of ours. By a wide margin. It doesn't matter who was behind it. They showed up.
They have been more effective these last few months. For our side, it took the biggest gun of them all to start turning things around a little: the president himself in a nationally televised address.
As Younge says:
Reducing a political strategy or belief to a psychological disorder to dismiss and ridicule its proponents may be comforting. But it also abandons any hope of defeating it or stymieing its influence beyond therapy.
Only mocking these protests isn't going to help. Also, we ourselves are guilty of being distracted by shiny objects. When it comes to distractions, blogs often don't do better than the traditional media.
These protests are not going away, and we need to be able to deal with them more effectively. I know that sounds easier sad than done; the media is often awful, and informing people about positive change is always harder than playing on people's fears with lies. But we have to do better.