Teabagger Enthusiasm Seems To Be Waning

Last week I wrote a post about a convention of teabaggers in Florida. The organizers rented a large hall in the expectation that thousands of people would attend. But those people never showed up -- in spite of the fact that at least 25 teabagger political heroes were scheduled to speak at the event. It turned out that only 12 teabaggers turned out for each speaker scheduled -- a total of about 300 people attended the convention (making the place look like a ghost town).

At that time I questioned whether the teabagger movement is dying out. Now there is more evidence that my speculation may be true. On the last day of March, the teabaggers organized an even more important event. They asked teabaggers to come to Washington (DC) by the thousands to put pressure on Republican legislators to stand firm in their efforts to make draconian cuts to the federal budget -- cuts that will hurt most ordinary Americans.

But the "huge" demonstration turned out to be a massive failure (see picture above). Predictions of the crowd size ranged from 100 to 300 (and around 20% of the crowd was made up of media there to cover the failed event). That had to be embarrassing for the organizers (and the Republican politicians who seem to think they represent the thinking of a majority of Americans).

Organizers for the event blamed the weather for the failure of teabaggers to attend the event -- it was a rather cool and gray day. I think that's a rather poor excuse. It's more likely that the enthusiasm for the crazy teabagger policies and politicians is waning -- especially in light of their giveaways to the rich while cutting everything valuable to most Americans. By comparison, the progressives in Wisconsin who opposed the actions of their governor were able to turn out a crowd of over 100,000 in weather much colder and nastier (and that was much larger than any teabagger gathering -- including Glenn Beck's quasi-religious Washington fiasco).

The fact is that the teabagger "movement" was never that large to begin with -- just loud. It was mainly just a fringe element within the Republican Party who were humiliated by their huge defeat in the 2008 election. Now reality seems to be setting in and the movement is dying out. This doesn't really surprise me since many of those teabaggers were older Americans and they now see their political heroes attacking Social Security and Medicare -- something they never wanted.

All I can say is good riddance to a ridiculous movement.