Tea Party's Census Rebellion 'Is a Bust'

The Tea Party may just be a "paper tiger," writes Dana Milbank. Leaders such as Michele Bachmann, Glenn Beck, and Ron Paul called for a boycott of the 2010 census—and it looks like nobody listened. Milbank asked number crunchers at the Washington Post to do some digging and found that Republican counties are returning their census forms at a better clip than Democratic ones.

Things could change, but as of now "there's no sign of a mass conservative boycott," Milbank writes at the Post. Instead, "there's evidence that this Tea Party rebellion is a bust." The response pattern "looks pretty much as it did a decade ago—when Beck worked at a Tampa radio station, Bachmann was running for the Minnesota state Senate, Paul was a little-known congressman, and a tea party involved Darjeeling." (More tea party activists stories.)