Sunday, March 21, 2010

Who are these guys?

Obama supporter and campaigner, Annabel Park, pens a column for CNN.com, “Why I started the Coffee Party USA”.

We’ve stated before that the Coffee Party movement is simply a collection of disaffected liberals who are frustrated Obama’s agenda has not progressed quickly enough and her article only re-enforces this notion.

What it is that they appear to be really big on is the influence wielded by lobbyists working on behalf of corporations. While that may be a noble and legitimate concern, it doesn’t address the central issue that the reason lobbyists enjoy such seemingly undue influence in the democratic process is because the government itself is such a powerful and authoritarian entity. Why else would these corporations and industry groups invest so much money lobbying if there was not going to be a payoff from the government in position to grant the wishes of these corporations? At the end of the day, the lobbyists are only a symptom of the problem.

Park never addresses this central issue. There is a lot of talk in the article about civil discourse and collective deliberation and what not but she never addresses the breadth and reach of government that is the cause of what the Coffee Party claims to be upset about.

Towards the end of the article, she lets the mask slip and reveals herself and her nascent movement for what it is.

We can find immediate institutional solutions -- for example, changing Senate rules and procedures that impede government, countering misinformation and promoting campaign finance reform and term limits.

It doesn’t take our vaunted de-coder ring to decipher this as frustration with the Republicans using the filibuster rules of the Senate to prevent/stall Obama’s statist agenda. Never mind the fact, it has been House Democrats that have been the ones gumming up the works.

Perhaps Ms. Park doesn’t speak for the entirety of the national Coffee Party movement, just as there is no national spokesperson for the Tea Party movement but any person interested in joining the Coffee Party should realize that despite the feel-good yet vague rhetoric, the Coffee Party is nothing more than Obama supporters who cannot believe that with their guy in office and majorities in both the House and Senate, they have not yet achieved the statist utopia of their dreams.

1 comment:

B-Daddy said...

The local leaders were long time far lefty types, so I wouldn't expect much else; but like SarahB, I will be throwing their "civility" tag line back at them at every opportunity, because if I know lefties, when they get frustrated they get nasty.