"The Tea Party Movement Is About To Be Hijacked"

What do I think about this sentiment?:

"The Tea Party Movement is about to be hijacked"

Well, what does it mean to hijack, say, an airliner, when the airliner is operated by Al Qaeda? The concept approaches meaninglessness.

All I know is that when I went to the Sacramento Tea Party demonstration last April 15th, I was very impressed by the leg work on display. Great signs, lots of great organization on display, and FOX News' national operation was there. But political work is grueling and hard, with impressive displays barely within the reach of volunteers, particularly at the initial stages of a movement, and so that meant someone had to pay for the work. I mean, FOX News isn't going to bother showing up unless they were relying upon intelligence from pretty-high muckety-mucks. After all, no one else gets FOX News to come to their inaugural demonstrations! And it was no surprise to me to eventually learn that Sacramento lobbyists, Russo Marsh & Rogers, were running the show. The lobbyists had hijacked the movement before there was a movement!

Nationally, there seem to be different groups of Tea Party activists, some under the sway of lobbyists, and some not. Some Tea Party activists have alleged that the mainstream media is ignoring them, but I bet that's not true. It may be true, however, that some Tea Party folks can make FOX News and the MSM media folks jump, and some can't.

Demonstrations + Volunteers = Media Eclipse

To describe the growing importance of lobbyists as a hijacking misses the point. There is a lot of work involved and someone has to do that work. Volunteers can't do it all.

What prompted this thought was this post:

Many on the right believe the burgeoning Tea Party "movement" is the key to a resurgent conservatism nationwide. But it's hard not to notice that the divisions among Teabaggers will need to be resolved sooner or later.

In the latest sign of rancor in Tea Party circles, a convention billed as an effort to bring together conservative activists from across the country is being attacked by some leading Tea Partiers as inauthentic, too tied to the GOP, and -- at $549 per head -- too expensive for the working Americans the movement aspires to represent.
The National Tea Party Convention, scheduled for early February in Nashville, grabbed headlines after announcing that Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann would appear as speakers, Palin as the keynote. According to a message on the convention's website, the event "is aimed at bringing the Tea Party Movement leaders together from around the nation." But organizers are a long way from unifying the notoriously fractious movement.

Tea Party Patriots, which helped put together a September rally that drew tens of thousands to Washington, view the confab -- which is being held at Nashville's swank Opryland Gaylord hotel -- as the "usurpation of a grassroots movement," according to Mark Meckler, a leader of the group. "Most people in our movement can't afford anything like that," Meckler told TPMmuckraker, referring to the price tag. "So it's really not aimed at the average grassroots person."

"The Tea Party Movement is about to be hijacked," wrote one activist in an online comment recently.