Epic Reading The Tea Party Leaves Fail

Nate Silver over at FiveThirtyEight.com pegs the Teabagger turnout at a quarter of a million. That's not bad. But as he points out:

One should bear in mind that ours is a large country, and that gatherings of this magnitude (if several hundred individual protests can be thought of as a "gathering") are not especially uncommon. For instance, protests in favor of immigration reform drew several million participants in the spring of 2006, including several individual events of at least 300,000. Likewise, anti-war protests in 2003 involved attendance of at least 300,000 in a single American city (New York) on a single day.

So, despite FOX, the astroturfing, the crazy fringe element and the heavy wingnut push, only a tiny fraction of the people showed up for Teabag 09 than turned out for the national anti-war protests or national immigration reform protests over the last couple years.

Seems like a tempest in a teabag to me. We're supposed to be listening to a tenth of a percent of the population as indicitive of the whole of America?

Approaching EPIC FAIL territory, Captain.

[UPDATE] The Daily Beast's John Avlon completely misses the lessons of Teabaggistock.

But liberals who want to dismiss yesterday’s tea parties do so at their peril. They should remember the Gandhi line their protest leaders often quote: “First they ignore you. Then they mock you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” Ignoring these tea parties didn’t work. We are now in the mocking phase—but for all the “Astroturf, not grassroots” asides, these crowds across the country were home-grown. They may have been pumped up by partisan interests but they were not purchased. Never forget that America was founded in part by a tax revolt. Now there is a real and predictable anger brewing at both big government and big business. This is bailout backlash. The 2008 election was not a liberal ideological mandate, and soon Main Street Americans will demand a return to fiscal responsibility.

No matter how large a majority in the country the Democrats have, it'll never be a mandate to the Village Idiots. Obama should completely abandon his agenda and listen to the 0.1% at the Tea Parties yesterday. After all, they're the ones with the mandate, apparently.

But remember, ten million anti-war protesters were dismissed as meaningless background noise and not a movement that would cost the GOP votes. This 250,000 strong movement is instead even more powerful somehow.