Can the Coffee Party rival the Tea Party?

(Image credit: Coffee Party USA)

last updated 8 January 2015

First came the fiscally conservative Tea Party movement. This weekend, its liberal counterpart, the pro-government Coffee Party was officially launched with dozens of quiet gatherings in coffee shops around the nation. (See an Instant Guide to the Coffee Party.) So far, Tea Partiers aren't impressed. Brendan Steinhauser of Freedomworks, a conservative nonprofit with ties to the Tea Party, said the tiny Coffee Party gatherings looked more "like a weak attempt at satire" than a serious grassroots answer to the Tea Party movement. Does the fledgling Coffee Party movement have any chance at disrupting the anti-tax Tea Party's growing power? (Watch a CNN report about the rise of the Coffee Party)

No, the Coffee Party is just a sham: Don't let the "fawning media coverage" fool you, says Lee Doren in Big Journalism. The Coffee Party is not a real grassroots movement with any real momentum. Founder Annabel Park and other Coffee Party leaders are "simply former Obama campaigners upset that the Tea Party has been able to thwart their Leftist agenda."

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The Coffee Party is as legitimately "grassroots" as the Tea Party: Tea partiers insist the Coffee Party is "Astroturf," says Patrik Jonsson in Truthout, but they're forgetting that the ostensibly "grassroots" Tea Party has received plenty of help from local Republican committees and activists. Ultimately, though, both movements are about a "communal search" for answers to the country's deepest problems.

The Coffee Party is too polite to suceed: The group means well, says Drew Grant in Mediaite, but its founder Annabel Park told Rachel Maddow she wants Coffee Party wannabees to "sign a civility pledge" and "leave our party affiliations at the door." That idealism, "however well-intentioned," will doom the Coffee Party, as the relatively crass Sarah Palin-endorsed tea partiers gain influence and steal headlines with their angry antics.