Schism brews in Coffee Party

The Coffee Party, which launched last year to mild public curiosity in reaction to the Tea Party wave, has receded from public view -- in part because of a schism between its centrist leadership and some left-leaning grassroots.

The movement, co-founded by filmmaker named Annabel Park, was initially seen as a progressive alternative to the Tea Party.

As Newsweek reported of an early meeting, members "were angry. They hated the Tea Party, and the Republican Party. They wanted to get even."

Park, however, says she intended the group to be centrist and non-partisan. She at one point weighed legal action to prevent the left-leaning faction from using their copyrighted logo after Darrell Bouldin, a Tennessee-based activist, started an offshoot called "Coffee Party Progressives."

Park wrote him last April, according to an email he forwarded POLITICO:

"I'm really unhappy with what I'm seeing on your fan page. We really need to talk about this. Why don't you join other progressive organizations to achieve your goals. We are trying to take people beyond partisan politics to solutions which are not born with partisan labels.

"I feel the name Coffee Party attracted so many people because they assumed it was a reaction to the Tea Party and a progressive counter. I get comments, emails, and etc. On this point all the time. I think this is how the Coffee Party got the numbers but why now so many are inactive," Bouldin wrote in an exchange with one of the Coffee Party state coordinators explaining why he wanted to remain active with the group a few moths later.

"The Tea Party's strength is in multiple organizations and groups around similar principles thugh they are astroturf and have radical elements on the bottom," Bouldin argued. "So a truly grassroots movement with multiple groups & organizations is even more possible for us. Coffee Party USA should not supress that."

"From the beginning of the movement I made it clear that the Coffee Party is a nonpartisan movement," Park told POLITICO. "I never quite understood why they wanted to continue using the Coffee Party name."

Park also said that the only legal action the organization considered was making sure that Coffee Party Progressives were not using the Coffee Party's trademarked logo -- which they weren't, and that she was not seeking to enforce the trademark (which they own) to the Coffee Party name.

UPDATE: Coffee Party's Eric Byler responds on the Coffee Party blog

Although the article quotes an email that Annabel Park wrote a year ago, and although neither she, nor I, nor anyone in Coffee Party USA has any bone to pick with Coffee Party Progressives today, the article does describe a larger truth, and the quote from Annabel's April 2010 email is still relevant today (even though we haven't visited their Facebook fan page in months). Truly, we have only best wishes and highest hopes for concerned citizens who want to engage in the deliberative process while fully embracing the partisan framework that dominates political discourse. We certainly do value and appreciate an energetic, populist left as exemplified by Coffee Party Progressives and many more established organizations. Such efforts and such movements are crucial to balance the highly organized and incredibly well-funded corporate right. The last thing we want to do is discourage the left from participating, and, in this case, if sharing our name helps them to recruit new members and inspire their current members, more power to them.