There has always been a far-right fringe in very-blue New York state, and Birchers, gun nuts, tax resisters, militia types, etc., have been active in the tea party movement across the state.
That is true in spades around Albany, NY, where the locals helped organize and promote "A Rally in support of the U.S. Constitution and New York State Sovereignty" Saturday at the Capitol, featuring sovereignty/militia/gun-rights hero Richard Mack, aka "Sheriff Mack," formerly of Graham County, AZ.
Mack is now a full-time far-right lecturer, expounding on his unique, absurd view that county sheriffs have the power to stop the federal government from doing anything in his/her county.
So, Mack must have drawn a big crowd, especially since this event was promoted by-e-mail and social media to many thousands of people in scores of right-wing/tea party groups.
Well, he did not -- it was another BIG FAIL, with a crowd that did not come close to breaking into three digits.
The rally was promoted statewide to "NY County Sheriff's, Sheriffs from other states, Tea Party groups, 912 groups,members of Primary Challenge, Campaign for Liberty groups, Oath Keepers, We the People group, all the grassroots candidates in New York and many other liberty groups."
And, besides the many speakers, it appears from this video that there were just a few dozen people in attendance (watch the pan of the crowd at the beginning, you can skip the 10th Amendment lunacy of the speech).
There were lots of speakers -- Lenny Roberto, a perennial political loser from western NY whose Primary Challenge trains wingnuts in election tactics; John Wallace, a retired state trooper from Columbia County who leads the local Oath Keepers group; Rick Montes of the state 10th Amendment Center (who provided the video above and a short blog post, which was the ONLY mention of this event post-facto I could find on the Internets); Robert Schulz, an anti-income-tax wingnut from Glens Falls who fancies himself a national "Constitutionalist" leader; Tim Chichester, a "Sovereignty and 17th Amendment" activist from Columbia County who was a pathetic U.S. Senate candidate this year; Tom Chandler, a gun nut turned tea partier from Guilderland; and four hopeless state/federal Republican candidates -- Gary Bernsten, Ted Danz, Deb Busch, and Robert Domenici.
Given the number of mostly local speakers, they and their families/friends certainly outnumbered the other attendees. Which means that 10 to 20 people came to hear Sheriff Mack.
AFAIK, the Mack event did not get any support from local conservative talk radio, which had helped the tea partiers get into the three digits at other events, like two Tea Party Express visits in the past year and their Tax Day rally this year.
Whatever, the turnout for Saturday's rally, featuring a national-level far-right celebrity, is more evidence that the tea party movement has shrunken back close to where it began -- the Ron Paul presidential campaign and the John Birch Society -- and that tea party crowds will always be embarrassingly small without strong promotion by talk radio at the local level and Fox News at the national level.
Another interesting aspect of the BIG FAIL 10th Amendment rally was that the local Republican candidate who is getting the most tea party support stayed away.
Retired Army Col. Chris Gibson, the Republican/Conservative challenger to NY-20 Rep. Scott Murphy, has explicitly allied himself with the tea partiers and hired a tea party leader as a top campaign staffer.
Perhaps Gibson caught a whiff of the FAIL, perhaps he's trying to disassociate from the far-right extremists who are going door-to-door and holding regular Paulite sign-waving events for him, or perhaps he decided to have an unavoidable "scheduling conflict" with Hillsdale Day in Columbia County.
You can be sure of one thing -- he was definitely invited.
