Big Mike: How Do You Take Your Coffee?

So today is National Coffee Party Day. Woo-hoo. It’s supposedly the liberals’ answer to the wingnut right’s Tea Parties.

They Prefer Tea

And that’s the problem with liberals and Democrats and all the rest of this holy land’s softies including abortionists and jackbooted homosexuals. Always a day late, always answering the right — as if the right is some authority to which one has to answer. Well, let me say…, wait, um, oops. On second thought, that is the right.

Anyway, I ought to be right in the middle of Coffee Party festivities. I sit here in my home away from home, Soma coffeehouse in good old Bloomington, Indiana. If Annabel Park and her gang of klatschers are really on to something, this place will be packed with citizens expounding on the evils of corporate America, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, and the fact that Glenn Beck is allowed to roam the streets without a straightjacket.

Annabel Park (photo by Eric Sueyoshi)

So, I look around and see…, a fairly empty coffeehouse. You see, yesterday was the last day of classes before spring break so Bloomington, much to the delight of townies, will be pretty much student-less for a week. Oh sure, the usual suspects are here. There’s the couple Sally and Harry — she works for Indiana University’s financial aid office and he’s in the Southeast Asian Studies department. Oh, and there’s the streetwise former Chicagoan, Pat, who’s the boss of the city’s water department, holding court at his customary table. We all usually talk about the issues of the day and pretty much agree that Bushey Boy was a lunkhead and Obama’s a hell of a lot better, but that isn’t really saying much.

I paid my respects to parties at both tables and not once did we talk about our visions for the future of this great republic, as Park might hope. The chief barista, Abbey, didn’t even have NPR on the radio, as it normally is on Saturday mornings. Instead, she’s playing that Feist disc, the one we’ve all heard so many times we just tune it out now, like music in an elevator.

The difference between the left and the right in America is the right has a clearly defined villain around whom they all can gather and lob verbal stones as well as the occasional real one. That would be one Barack Hussein Obama, as they like to refer to him — that is, when they’re not calling him Obama bin Laden or Adolf Owe-bama. The left, on the other hand, has a cast of thousands to demonize. My personal fave is Lloyd Blankfein. Others prefer Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. Then there’s Dick Cheney. Sarah Palin. Mitch McConnell. John Boehner. Oil company CEOs. Fundamentalists. The Texas board of education. Birthers. The Micheles: Malkin and Bachmann. They all have their little hissing sections within the left.

How can you get people to stand up as one — as Annabel Park hopes Coffee Party Day will do — when they’re all splintered into little diverse subsets? One of the cardinal rules of organizing is to get people to identify a single threat they can all agree on. And, man, Obama fits that bill perfectly for the right. They don’t even need a secret handshake. They can simply spout “Obama’s a socialist” (code for I’ll never accept the fact that a brown man is the president) and their confreres will jump out of the woodwork. The more radical among them might simply say “Obama’s destroying this country” (another code, this one meaning Now all our sisters/wives/daughters will be going black before you know it.) That gang is stocking up on canned goods and ammo.

He Knows What’s Wrong And What To Do About It

We dedicated liberals, progressives, mild radicals, social capitalists, and the like need a straw man like that. As I indicated earlier, my vote would go to the CEO of Goldman Sachs. But Lloyd Blankfein lacks the cachet, the aura, the celebrity. Half the people on my side of the political spectrum probably don’t even know who he is. We need someone with pizzazz. Someone who looks great on TV. Someone whose very being threatens the ideals we hold dear.

John McCain wasn’t that person. Nor would Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney be. Frankly, not even Glenn Beck fills the bill. Trying to demonize him would be like picking on a wimpy fat kid in the fifth grade. Only toward the end of his term did the public  catch on that George W. Bush was the personification of all that was wrong with the right. Before that, we had to pretend to support him as commander in chief after 9/11.

We need, in short, Sarah Palin. Then we can have a real National Coffee Party Day.

The Look Of Love