Colbert-Stewart rally: Bigger than a tea party?
(Read article summary)People who can't make it to Washington for the Jon Stewart-Stephen Colbert 'Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear' Oct. 30 are holding 'meet-ups.' By one measure, the rally might spawn more local events than the tea party movement has.
Los Angeles
As the clock counts down to the Oct. 30 "Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear" in Washington, the number of sister events in support of the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert extravaganza is exploding.
You can actually go to the event's websites and watch the number speed upwards in real time. As of this writing, the tally of “meet-ups” – which includes everything from a few buddies at a sports bar to the grand second- and third-city events planned for Chicago and Los Angeles, complete with pricey jumbotron screens and city permits – is 801 cities in 67 countries.
"This is growing faster than any online meet-up we’ve seen,” says Andres Glusman, vice president of strategy and community for Meetup.com, the firm behind the little widget on the events' sites. He spoke from a Manhattan street corner where he had just emerged from a meeting with the Colbert Report team.
His company, founded in 2002, has powered the online grassroots organizing behind the 2004 Howard Dean presidential bid and the tea party movement. He says he would not be surprised to see the Colbert/Stewart rally surpass the numbers put up by the tea party by the Nov. 2 election. Tea party groups currently have about 2,500 events scheduled on the website.
The next question, of course, is what this will all mean come election day.
