Rich Lowry:
It’s beginning to look a lot like August 2009 in reverse.
In that summer of the Tea Party, conservative activists packed the town-hall meetings of Democratic congressmen and peppered them with hostile questions. It was an early sign of the abiding opposition that Obamacare would encounter, and the prelude to Democratic defeats in 2010, 2014, and 2016.
Now, progressive activists are tearing a page from that playbook. The scenes are highly reminiscent of 2009, with Republican officeholders struggling to control unruly forums and leaving their town-hall meetings early or not holding them in the first place.
The partisan temptation in this circumstance is always to dismiss the passion of the other side, which is what Democrats did to their detriment in 2009 and Republicans are doing now.
It’s not often that White House press secretary Sean Spicer sounds like his Obama predecessor Robert Gibbs, but on this, he might as well be reading leftover talking points. Gibbs dismissed the Tea Party’s town-hall agitation eight years ago as “manufactured anger” reflecting “the Astro-turf nature of grassroots lobbying.” Spicer says of the town-hall protests, “It’s not these organic uprisings that we’ve seen through the last several decades — the Tea Party was a very organic movement — this has become a very paid, Astro-turf-type movement.”
What was true in 2009 is true today: In the normal course of things, it’s not easy even for a well-funded and -organized group to get people to spend an evening at a school auditorium hooting at their congressman. If these demonstrations are happening in districts around the country, attention must be paid.
This is not to condone the more rancid elements of the Left’s ferment (blocking Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from entering a Washington, D.C., school was petty thuggishness), nor is it to consider what is happening as nearly as significant as the Tea Party — yet.
To become the Left’s equivalent of the Tea Party, the protestors will have to persist despite the inevitable legislative defeats on the horizon; organize at the grass-roots level; play in Democratic primaries; make their own party’s establishment miserable; and pick off a significant Republican seat in what seems like impossible territory, the way Scott Brown did in the Massachusetts special election after the death of Ted Kennedy.
None of this is certain, or necessarily likely. But Democrats deluded themselves in 2009 by disregarding the early signs of fierce resistance to their agenda, and paid the price over and over again for their heedless high-handedness. Republicans shouldn’t make the same mistake.
Those U.C. Berkeley rioters should all be rotting in jail and fined and be made to pay for their crimes and vandalism
They won’t become like the Tea Party until they start cleaning up after themselves.
No worries.
It is clear as glass that the Soros machine is sending it’s fascist troops to town hall meetings to fill seats with bused in alt-left activists, to give a false impression of anti-Trump community support. Rich Lowry is being misled (perhaps willingly) by the activists smoke and mirrors.
STUDY: Extreme protest tactics likely to backfire
Like the idiots who blocked the ambulence and frankly these should be held accountible for this crime after all its illegal to delay a ambulence with its lights and siren going