AFP clearly meant to demonstrate a public counterweight to Occupy, which had commemorated its birthday a few days earlier with vigorous demonstrations. The politics were explicit: The Guardian quotes New Jersey AFP state director, Steve Lonegan:
The Occupy Wall Street crowd is nothing but a fringe element of malcontents bent on mayhem and destruction. These are people who despise free enterprise. They are not attacking Wall Street. They are attacking the very freedoms that everyday Americans cherish to pursue their own dreams and succeed.
On a weekday–and without a chapter in New York City–AFP was able to turn out a few dozen people. And it’s not clear they were all Tea Partiers. 
Well-dressed provocateurs turned up with signs and slogans they thought might embarrass the Tea Partiers (at left, for example).
The Occupy commemoration, which generated numbers the the Wall Street Journal estimated as over 1,000 in Manhattan, and sympathy demonstrations across the nation, was widely portrayed as a sign of the movement’s fading. Then again, unlike AFP, Occupy will not be sponsoring a $25 million ad campaign in support of a presidential candidate (AFP’s candidate is still Mitt Romney).
So, does this mean anything? One message is that the Tea Party’s capacity to mobilize at the grassroots isn’t what it used to be–not that Manhattan was ever a stronghold. At the moment, most of the energy and money is still going into the electoral campaign. If President Obama is reelected, however, it’s likely that the groups underneath the Tea Party will try to resurrect the grassroots mobilization approach of 2009. Organizers successfully steered that earlier wave of activism into electoral influence in the Republican Party and in the midterm elections.
Will they be able to go back to the grassroots?
Politics Outdoors 
Reblogged this on Life in the Mitten and commented:
Another awesome blog post! AFP has long been an organization aimed solely at smearing anyone who disagrees with them. As pathetic as it must have been, it must have been refreshing to see them numbering less than 20.
AFP doesn’t generally rely on public demonstrations–for understandable reasons.
Awesome post!!
“A fringe element of malcontents” and yet there are over 1400+ Occupations in 80+ countries? If there were true free enterprise in this country, then corporations wouldn’t be getting bailouts. If there were true free enterprise in this country, then there wouldn’t be so much collusion, monopoly dealing and insider trading going on. Everyone associated with this is moronic.
It’s hard to describe groups generating hundreds and thousands as fringe when you can only turn out a couple of dozen.