Nate Silver has been compiling turnout estimates for Wednesday's tea parties and now believes attendance was a shade over 300,000. Say what you will, but those are impressive numbers for protests that were putatively about overly loose fiscal policy.The putative bit of that is important, though: My sense of the Tea Parties is that they were really about the conservative opposition standing up and defining itself as such. That's a strange transition to make after eight years of power and this seemed like an almost ritualized method of accepting it.Which is why comparisons to the Iraq War protests are, I think, misguided. The anti-war rallies were not tightly associated with the Democratic Party or the outlets of Democratic opinion. Indeed, they were, broadly speaking, oriented against the party's establishment: Daschle and Gephardt and Clinton and Holbrooke and Lieberman and Edwards were not whipping up the crowds with their fierce opposition to invasion. There was no analogue to Fox's involvement nor anything even near the embrace offered by the many Republican governors in attendance. They were about a political issue, but they didn't speak to a broader political identity.In a sense, the better analogue is Dean's MeetUps. They began, to be sure, as a more marginal phenomenon, and they certainly didn't begin with an array of high profile politicians. But they were about the type of opposition party that the grassroots wanted to build. Much like the Tea Parties were about fiscal policy but really about the nature of Republican opposition, the Dean MeetUps were about Dean but really about the nature of the Democratic Party (as, at that time, was Dean). TEA PARTYING FOR A CAUSE.
Nate Silver has been compiling turnout estimates for Wednesday's tea parties and now believes attendance was a shade over 300,000. Say what you will, but those are impressive numbers for protests that were putatively about overly loose fiscal policy.The putative bit of that is important, though: My sense of the Tea Parties is that they were really about the conservative opposition standing up and defining itself as such. That's a strange transition to make after eight years of power and this seemed like an almost ritualized method of accepting it.Which is why comparisons to the Iraq War protests are, I think, misguided. The anti-war rallies were not tightly associated with the Democratic Party or the outlets of Democratic opinion. Indeed, they were, broadly speaking, oriented against the party's establishment: Daschle and Gephardt and Clinton and Holbrooke and Lieberman and Edwards were not whipping up the crowds with their fierce opposition to invasion. There was no analogue to Fox's involvement nor anything even near the embrace offered by the many Republican governors in attendance. They were about a political issue, but they didn't speak to a broader political identity.In a sense, the better analogue is Dean's MeetUps. They began, to be sure, as a more marginal phenomenon, and they certainly didn't begin with an array of high profile politicians. But they were about the type of opposition party that the grassroots wanted to build. Much like the Tea Parties were about fiscal policy but really about the nature of Republican opposition, the Dean MeetUps were about Dean but really about the nature of the Democratic Party (as, at that time, was Dean). 
