New political brews: coffee, tea, or cocoa parties
Tea Party meeting sign in rural Texas
The Tea Party movement celebrated its one-year anniversary at the end of February. In 2009, the grassroots surge of conservative-minded voters had brewed up a political tempest in their tea pot by staging hundreds of “tax day” tea parties on April 15th across the country. From then until now, the upstart movement has managed to influence several major political elections and events, call the mainstream media into account for anti-conservative biases, and establish itself as an almost daily fixture in the national news cycle; no mean feat for any grassroots effort let alone a staunchly conservative one.
But maybe the biggest sign of the Tea Party movement’s success and effectiveness at stirring things up across the political landscape is the current burst of wannabe, beverage-oriented “movements” bubbling up through the social media. First came the Coffee Party Movement, which started to percolate online around the time the tea party movements were celebrating their first anniversary. Coffee Party USA founder, Annabel Park, called it an alternative to the Tea Party movement, claiming the group was designed to be “a grassroots online Facebook network which advocates cooperation among elected representatives and promotes civil public discourse.”
The most obvious implication of Park’s mission statement is her view that the Tea Party does not promote “civil” public discourse nor advocate “cooperation” among elected representatives. These contra-conservative overtones have continued throughout Park’s public appearances. Her YouTube video – Coffee Party: How We Began – clearly aims to characterize tea partiers as divisive and “obstructionist.” This begs the question of whether the Coffee Party Movement would be “obstructive” toward conservative legislation they oppose.
Park, who appears to be Asian, also takes aim at what she sees as the tea partiers’ lack of ethnic diversity. She stops short of actually playing the race card but the YouTube video makes it clear this is another one of Park’s talking points about the Tea Party movement.
Watch the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lO_5HvnFEv0
More egregious to tea partiers about coffee partiers, however, might be the mainstream media omissions about the founder of the Coffee Party movement. Newsbusters’ Matthew Balan reported on CNN’s bias toward Park (www.newsbusters.org). According to Balan, “John Roberts and Kiran Chetry omitted mentioning that Annabel Park, the founder of the so-called Coffee Party, worked as a volunteer for President Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, during an interview on Wednesday’s American Morning. The anchors also didn’t mention Park’s past work for the liberal New York Times.”
Read more here: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-balan/2010/03/03/cnn-omits-coffee-party-founders-past-obama-volunteer#ixzz0h8oUboHe
Also read William Jacobson on his Legal Insurrection blog – as reported by the Media Research Center (MRC) – where he “cited some of Park’s posts on her Twitter account, including this charming appeal to sweet reason posted by Park on January 26, where Park sounds far less measured…
‘we need to re-engage the grassroots movemnt that got Obama elected. we need to get busy. cannot give it away to tea baggers.'”
The MRC story goes on to report that “Jacobson also uncovered Park’s support for the Obama campaign…Jacobson found that Park was ‘one of the organizers and operators of the United for Obama video channel at YouTube.'”
Read the MRC story here: http://www.mrc.org/timeswatch/articles/2010/20100303082633.aspx
Now there’s the “Cocoa Party” movement, also founded on Facebook, which puts forth a mission “…to forge a culture of ludicrous propaganda that is entirely blame-oriented.”
The FB page can be found at: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=340386299906&v=info
So what’s next? The latte party? The chai movement? Suffice it to say that the days of two-party political rhetoric are definitely over. Time to brew up a cuppa whatever you’re drinking, log on and enjoy the show.
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FreemanSpeaks also writes for The Austin Capital Times online: http://www.austincapitaltimes.com Follow on Twitter: @ATXCapTimes
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