Frank Strategies: The Blog

The Left’s Energy Crisis

In this morning’s Washington Post, Dana Milbank provides further evidence that the grassroots energy level on the left continues to wane.

Even as his Post colleague Dan Eggen attempts to put a positive spin on attendance at this week’s “America’s Future Now” conference by describing it as the gathering of “several thousand liberal activists,” Milbank tells the real story on the opposite page:

“(Group Co-Director Roger) Hickey estimates attendance dropped from 2,500 last year to 1,500 this year, and even that may overstate things. At yesterday morning’s four concurrent “issue briefings,” 585 chairs were set out. Only 213 of them were occupied, including just 15 for the session on global warming. “Radio row” was quiet, the “TV Terrace” was empty, and two people sat typing on “Blogger Boulevard.”

This is completely consistent with what we’ve seen at many other political events this year. Grassroots conservatives and libertarians, newly freed from the Bush and McCain albatrosses and aghast at government bailouts and debt piling up at previously unimaginable levels, are staging massive Tea Party rallies and packing the Virginia GOP Convention literally to the rafters of the RIchmond Coliseum.

Meanwhile, liberal Tea Parties draw embarrassingly small crowds, and as the video below shows, even Democratic debates in the the biggest campaign of the year are playing to half-empty rooms.

It’s indisputable that since January the grassroots energy has shifted monumentally to the right. The only question now is whether it’ll last long enough to translate to electoral victories in November of 2009 and 2010.

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