By Their Own Criteria, Teabagger Recess Rallies were a Massive Failure

Sometimes inflating your numbers can get you into trouble. At previous teabagger rallies, local right-wing bloggers have been pulling large numbers out of a hat to pretend that their rallies were huge. For example, citing no sources whatsoever, Gateway Pundit made up the number 10,000 to describe a gathering of people in Kiener Plaza on tax day. Granted, it was a decent turnout; but the number 10,000 was pretty obviously an exaggeration.

But more importantly for present purposes, this exaggeration set the stage for what can only be described as a massive failure. Check out how the official tea party facebook group overseen by teabag king Bill Hennessy was billing last weekend's "recess rallies":

This is THE event of 2009, patriots. February 27, Tax Day, July 4 . . . think of those as recruiting drives. They were rallies. They did not move the needle.
August 22 moves the needle and moves mountains. IF YOU COMMIT to this event, you will change history. IF YOU STAY HOME, you will lose your country.

Yet, according to even their own exaggerated numbers, they only had 2,000 people at St. Louis rallies this past weekend. It's also worth noting that pretty much all of the local media gave an equal opportunity for reporters of health care reform to voice their message as opponents. In other words, not only are the teabaggers rapidly losing momentum, but the event they claimed all other events led up to was attended by approximately one fifth of the people who attended their earlier events, according to their own estimates! "THE EVENT" was only 1/5 as large as the "recruiting drives."

And in case you don't believe my assessment of their dismal failure, you can read Bill Hennessy's comment lamenting the tactical error of continuing with the rallies:

IMO, opponents of ObamaCare should have stopped this tactic before the left responded since a punch that misses requires 3 times the energy of a punch that lands. Continuing to flood town halls in the St. Louis area would be, at this point, irresponsible and undisciplined. For us, town halls present high risk and low reward.

Of course, in the full context of his quote he is saying that they shouldn't hold any future rallies, but it's easy to see that what motivates this is the fact that their rallies are losing rather than gaining momentum. Bill Hennessy is right; they should have quit before they lost 4/5 of their support.