Sizing up the Tea Party protest
Just how important, and big, was the Glenn Beck–inspired “9/12” march in Washington?
Protestors against excessive goverment spending marched on Washington on Saturday.
(Wikipedia Commons/Patriot Room)
“The weirdness of the Wingnut summer isn’t over,” said John Avlon in The Daily Beast, at least if Saturday’s Glenn Beck–inspired “9/12” march of “angry white people” on Washington is any sign. The protest channeled very real “pent-up frustration” at federal overspending, mixed with a “spicy dash of paranoia,” that poses a very real danger for the Democrats. But Republicans may soon regret stirring this “crazy pot”—they can’t "contain or moderate” it.
That’s the classic way to “marginalize a significant protest” you don’t agree with, said Matt Welch in the New York Post. First you “dismiss participants as deranged and possibly dangerous kooks,” when in this case it was “a huge gathering of mostly white, mostly right-of-center Americans” passionately unhappy with big-government policies. Then you “lowball” the attendance numbers.
On the other hand, "if you don’t want to be discredited,” don’t inflate the numbers, said Nate Silver in FiveThirtyEight. ABC News, citing the fire department, puts attendance at 70,000, but Matt Kibbe of protest co-organizer FreedomWorks said 1.5 million people showed up. Kibbe lied. It wasn’t a small rally (nor a “particularly large” one), and the 70,000 who showed up deserve better than Kibbe.
Still, it kind of chafes that the supposedly liberal media is treating 70,000 “Tea Baggers” as a “major political movement,” said Steve Benen in Washington Monthly, when gatherings of 100,000 or more anti–Iraq War protesters were routinely dismissed as largely irrelevant “liberal hippies out of step with the mainstream.”
Those anti-war protests just showed that "using protest size as a gauge of popular sentiment is stupid," said Allahpundit in Hot Air. The turnout was huge for those marches back in 2003, but support for the war was 65 percent. Whatever the true size of the 9/12 rally, one thing's for sure—there were more people there than anyone expected.
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48 Comments
Posted by HWC, Monday, September 14, 2009, 11:22 am Ho hum. The wild and desparate cries of the marginalized radical rightwing. I wish the media would stop covering this because it's plain that the rest of the country has lost interest. Nothing here folks, time to move on.
Posted by Don, Monday, September 14, 2009, 11:28 am Another example of the socalled media trying to downplay conservative ideals. I was there, there were at least a half a million people there. If the media had done it's job and covered it, there would be no question, but now we must rely on Web Cams....Wow, between 500,000 and a million people march on washington and we have to look at Web Cams to see it..... The left wing loons need to go
Posted by jim, Monday, September 14, 2009, 11:46 am Another example of unsubstantiated and inflated crowd estimates. I was there. There were well under 50,000 people there, and their movements were heavily choreographed to give biased media like Glen Beck's FOX News the illusion that their numbers were much greater. Nice try, but no cigar this time.
Posted by lfn-sc, Monday, September 14, 2009, 11:46 am Is this the proverbial forest for the trees? You almost had it...The loons need to go. Period. Left, right, no matter....we have become a nation of extremists. When will cooler heads step up and take the reins?
Posted by Jeff, Monday, September 14, 2009, 12:42 pm Go search youtube for time lapse washington protest and see for yourself how big this was. Anyone who's ever been to a sporting event knows what 50,000 people looks like. This was far bigger than that. Democrats and Republicans in Congress and at the White House go ahead and keep dismissing these people as angry white radicals. It will be your undoing.
Posted by Bo, Monday, September 14, 2009, 12:49 pm The Headline is ridiculous. Glenn Beck did not sponsor nor encourage this. This is a grass roots movement that has real legs. The longer that this is ignored by BOTH parties, the sooner you are going to have a new Congress that is elected to do what they are supposed to do...represent the PEOPLE!
Posted by JIM, Monday, September 14, 2009, 12:55 pm If the media wasn't there why should we trust their attendance count?
Posted by D. H. Swinehart, Monday, September 14, 2009, 1:00 pm 70,000, 500,000, 1.5 million...whatever number you choose, it all goes to prove what H.L. Mencken said: Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
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