Rallies don't win elections

Occupy Wall Street gets the ink, Tea Party gets the voters

By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds 

Occupy Wall Street and the movement's brethren in other cities ranging from Chicago, to Baltimore, to Oakland, to London -- has been getting all the press lately.

But it's the Tea Party movement and its small-government ideology that continues to win elections. Is that a harbinger for 2012? Probably.

There's no doubt that the Occupy folks have been getting the lion's share of the ink, and the pixels, over the last month or so. Love them or hate them, their approach is mediagenic, reminding Baby Boomers of protests from their lost (or imagined) youths, and inspiring younger folks who missed the Sixties to take a shot at creating their own protest mythology.

Though they've mobilized a fraction of the people who turned out for just one Tea Party rally -- the 9/12 rally in Washington, which drew well into the six figures -- the Occupy protests have generated far more publicity. And, at least until recently, that publicity has been mostly favorable.

But while lefty share-the-wealth demonstrations have seized the imagination of our nation's mainstream media, they once again failed to persuade taxpayers to loosen their grips on their pocketbooks.

In Colorado, a tax-increase effort, massively supported (to the tune of about 20 to 1 in terms of spending) by teachers unions, failed miserably. Not only did it lose by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, it failed to carry a majority even in heavily Democratic Denver. (It barely eked out a majority in Colorado's farthest-left enclave of Boulder County.)

As Colorado talk-radio host Ross Kaminsky blogged, "The wide margin of defeat for Proposition 103 could only happen with a substantial majority -- something on the order of two-thirds -- of unaffiliated (independent) voters opposing the measure, something which portends well for Republican hopes in 2012 elections." This despite the fact that Colorado went for Obama in 2008.

More troubling still for the Obama Administration is that the rhetoric of the tax increase's supporters sounded much like that coming from the Obama camp -- lots of talk about "investments" and lots of pictures of children. But taxpayers didn't buy it.

Why not? Perhaps because the past couple of years have demonstrated, in a fashion hard to miss, that no matter what politicians promise, new government spending seems, somehow, to wind up in the pockets of politicians' cronies.

So when "new revenues" are sold as "investments in the community," voters hear instead "taking my money to give it to your buddies and buy votes." Not surprisingly, this doesn't sell.

Indeed, though education is often used to sell tax increases, that approach now seems to be foundering on a lack of results. Nearly every voter knows that spending on education at all levels, though perennially characterized as inadequate, has in fact grown enormously over past decades, but without any visible result.

So, despite vast increases in spending, few would argue that students graduating from high school are better educated today than they were 50 years ago, and few believe that colleges have improved at the same rate that tuitions have gone up, if, indeed, they have improved at all in terms of education.

In this, interestingly, the Occupy movement may have unwittingly lent a hand to the Tea Party. Everyone who has followed the wall-to-wall news coverage has seen the sad stories of protesters who went deeply in debt for college degrees (admittedly, often degrees in things like Peace Studies, but nonetheless, still college degrees) and who now say they are unable to find work.

Faced with those stories, voters may understandably have concluded that more spending on colleges and schools was unlikely to do much to promote employment, regardless of what the political ads from the teachers' unions and higher-education folks claimed.

If education is so great, after all, why are so many educated people unemployed and camping out in public parks?

This is a good question, and similar ones might profitably be asked with regard to other public programs whose spending climbs faster than inflation but whose results remain unimpressive -- which is to say, most public programs.

It's not that the education system is our only public-spending failure, it's just that the Occupy movement has done such a persuasive job of illustrating the particular failures of the education system.

Or course, the Occupy movement has helped the Tea Party in another way: By keeping lefties busy. While the occupiers have been holding their drum circles, the Tea Party movement -- now long past the mass-rally stage -- has been going about the less conspicuous work of registering voters and organizing.

As I wrote back in 2010, "Rallies without follow-through are just rallies. And the Tea Party movement is now following through with the grunt work of politics: Organizing precincts, waging primary battles, registering voters, and compiling mailing lists."

Rallies don't win elections. Neither do drum circles. Organizing does. Let Occupiers and Tea Partiers alike take note.