Enormous Tea Party Crowd At Giant Washington Rally! Hundreds Of People!

Dick Armey's FreedomWorks spent weeks using their money and muscle to sponsor a giant Tea Party Rally in Washington. Here's a list of speakers they had planned for the rally:

Dick Armey, Chairman,FreedomWorks
Matt Kibbe, President, FreedomWorks
Lord Monckton [Climate change denier-in-chief]
Andrew Breitbart [!]
Andrew Moylan, National Taxpayers Union
Nic Lott, Mississippi
Rev. C.L. Bryant, Louisiana
Deneen Borelli, New York
Tom Gaitens, FreedomWorks Florida
Tucker Carlson [!]
Brendan Steinhauser
Congressman Ron Paul, TX [!]
Congressman Tom Price, GA

They tried to beef things up somewhat, I guess; I know that speakers included Tea Party crowd-pleasers Michele Bachmann, Louie Gohmert, Mike Pence, Allen West, and Jim DeMint.  Still, 200 people, when they got 100,000 in the snow in Madison, Wisconsin? (And that's without funding from Dick Armey -- or George Soros, or anyone else, for that matter.)

This from Salon:

The Tea Party Comes to D.C., in Small Numbers, On Message

Posted Thursday, March 31, 2011 1:29 PM | By David Weigel

Tea Party Patriots and a small constellation of movement organizations held a rally near the Capitol just now, an attempt to back up the House and Senate GOP in the fight over the continuing resolution.

It was a small rally. I estimated that around 200 people showed up; Andrew Langer of the Institute for Liberty quickly challenged that, and said it was a bit bigger, but at the time, we were standing where the crowd was getting thick. Here's a quick shot from the other side of the rally, in front of the seven camera stand-ups:


The media coverage of the event was intense; there seemed to be around four protesters for every reporter. (I was accidentally interrupted twice by camera crews who were trying to grab interviews with people I was talking to.) So the message of the day probably got out, and the message was: Don't blame Tea Partiers if there's a shutdown, blame Democrats. One of the only people who strayed off message was Rep. Mike Pence, who raised the possibility and inspired cries of "Cut or shut! Cut or shut!"

If there's much media focus on how small the rally was, I think that would miss the point [I don't.]. There was a total sense of victory on display. Cindy Wilkerson, a social worker who came up from Mississippi to attend the event, told me she was heading to her representatives' offices next -- three of the state's four members are Republicans, as are both senators -- and telling them to "hold the line." Sen. Rand Paul told me that the Democrats' increasing concessions on spending proved that they were "reading the tea leaves, so to speak."

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Here's a paragraph from Digby at Hullabaloo. I've always thought this was quite obviously the case -- the Tea Party was a diversion to direct political focus away from a Republican party that Bush left in total disgrace -- but I haven't seen it expressed very often, if at all:

The Tea Party as a distinct identity was always going to be short lived. We have a two party system and these so-called non-partisan splinter groups tend to move back into the system after a cycle or two. In this case, it was a brilliant strategy on the part of the GOP and the plutocrats. They had to separate themselves quickly from the Bush legacy of failure so they jumped on/created a separate conservative strain they could portray as distinct from the party and mobilize it for 2010. The succeeded admirably, but they aren't needed anymore. The energy is gone and they are going back to the party.

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And here's a link to a comment on the rally from Crooks & Liars.