Media Continues Attempts at Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitation of Tea Party

Let's review the recent history of the St. Louis Tea Party. Their rallies have shrunk to tiny fractions of their original sizes, to the point where they have started repeatedly making excuses for the small crowd sizes. In the April ballot initiative that they chose to call a test of their organizational strength, they were only able to get 37% of county voters to vote against a new tax, raised less money than my birthday cause on facebook, and only ever got a maximum of 25 people (and that's being generous) to come out to a support rally. They've been hampered by infighting and unanswered questions about the group's organization. Furthermore, their "new" projects like Ensuring Liberty and Conservatives of America have shown no signs whatsoever of having any political impact.

In fact, the only thing preventing the St. Louis tea party from fading off into complete obscurity has been the media's willingness to hand them a microphone whenever they ask for one, in ways that they never did for similar progressive organizing initiatives. The most recent example of this is the coverage of the fact that the tea party managed to get a whole 40 people to buy group tickets to a St. Louis Cardinals game. Both KSDK and the Post-Dispatch covered this amazingly exciting event.

Of course, there are progressive social events every single week that are more interesting and get a larger turnout that don't ever seem to get covered. But of course, this is the tea party, so makes it totally new and exciting, right? At least, it would if it was still 2009.