It’s not clear whether the so-called coffee party movement will catch on to any significant degree, but the impetus here is a popular one: the grassroots frustration among liberals with the current gridlock in Congress over health care reform and the success of the conservative tea party movement.
Annabel Park, the coffee party founder seen in this video (shot in D.C.’s DuPont Circle) also claims several other unrelated grievances, though. “We are completely comfortable with the changing demographics of our country,” she says, before going on to blast “politicians who are exploiting that anxiety [over demographics] for political gain” as “simply the worst.”
Park, a documentary filmmaker, got the ball rolling with this status update earlier in the year, posted to the popular social networking site Facebook:
let’s start a coffee party . . . smoothie party. red bull party. anything but tea. geez. ooh how about cappuccino party? that would really piss ‘em off bec it sounds elitist . . . let’s get together and drink cappuccino and have real political dialogue with substance and compassion.
The Washington Post reports that followers quickly jumped on the bandwagon, leaving Park struggling to keep up with all the attention: “She’s exhausted, overcommitted, passing whole days on Facebook, not collecting a paycheck, hopping between conference calls, sending e-mails at 4 a.m., smoothing out conflicts over strategy.”
Still, don’t expect any specific goals just yet — “Our activities will unfold in in stages,” the coffee partiers insist on their Web site, which helpfully sells T-shirts and accepts donations. (Attempts to purchase an actual coffee cup from the organization were unsuccessful as of press time.)
The group also acknowledges on its YouTube channel that it isn’t the first of its kind:
We realize there are “Coffee Party” groups popping up all over the country, many of them independently and many of them a bit ahead of us in choosing the coffee theme. I hope we can all work together toward common goal.
Via Hot Air, we can see how members of the new tea’d-off party explain the movement:
On their Web site (which seems to have about a couple hundred viewers online at any given time), the coffee party defines its mission a little more clearly:
MISSION: The Coffee Party Movement gives voice to Americans who want to see cooperation in government. We recognize that the federal government is not the enemy of the people, but the expression of our collective will, and that we must participate in the democratic process in order to address the challenges that we face as Americans. As voters and grassroots volunteers, we will support leaders who work toward positive solutions, and hold accountable those who obstruct them.
Other coffee party members have posted to YouTube what appear to be inspirational messages encouraging a fight with tea party activists:
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