It turned out to be a surprisingly large protest in Washington. There were some other teaparties elsewhere in the country, too. Like Quincy, Illinois. The right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for redress of grievances.
A pretty big peaceable assembly. Glenn Reynolds on the quality of community organizing at the smaller Quincy Tea Party:
I’ve been involved with a lot of events over my life, from civil rights protests to rock concerts to science fiction conventions, and I’ve never been involved with an event that ran with such well-oiled efficiency. . . .The Libertarian magazine Reason's editor Matt Welch gives his first take on the Washinton, D.C. rally:
One interesting note: I’ve said this before, but those in the GOP who think that the Tea Party movement is for their benefit need to think again. Roger Stone spoke, and while nobody had anything against him in particular, several people told me that they thought the GOP was trying to co-opt the Tea Party Movement, and they weren’t happy about that. My advice to the GOP — and, for that matter, to those Democrats who care — is to try to find a way to address the Tea Party crowd’s interests, bearing in mind that if you don’t they’re just as happy to throw Republicans out of office as Democrats.
But it probably doesn’t matter. Based on the level of organization, commitment, and sheer likability I saw this weekend, the folks from Quincy are going to wind up ruling the world anyway . . . .
This is all, obviously, a partial and unscientific take, and not an attempt to encapsulate a huge event, but rather a faithful rendering of what I saw. With that caveat, I had a very hard time reconciling the human beings I talked to and observed with the caricatures described in pre-writes by the New York Times' Gail Collins ("The tea party movement activists range from geeky Ron Paulists who obsess about the money supply to conspiracy theorists who believe that Barack Obama is a noncitizen brought here by people who hate this country"), the L.A. Times' Tim Rutten ("the talk-show/tea-party right...if it has its way–will convert the GOP into an almost exclusively white, zealously religious, mostly Southern party"), and Gawker's Alex Pareene ("Glenn Beck is an actual terrorist, and the people attending his rally in DC tomorrow are al-Qaeda in America").
Political rallies are no place to seek the subtle truth, nor feel particularly glowing about your countrymen, and today was no different in that regard for me. But the meta-fact about a huge anti-Obamanomics protest eight months into his term is certainly significant, and very little of what I saw made me fear that Alex Pareene will be blown to smithereens by a suicide hijacker from Arkansas. I am confident, however, that I will soon be made to fear what I utterly failed to detect.
Bomb Threat.
New York Times "post-reporting"
CNN
Samplie images:
Protesting the media. And taxes.
Impeach Everybody.
Astroturf? "Take a moment to sympathize with the "special interest" accountants who have to cut all these checks"
Protesting the government pushing debt into the future.
Worried about the Constitution.
Instapundit:
“Many protesters said they paid their own way to the event – an ethic they believe should be applied to the government.” Why is the British press more honest in its reporting on this stuff than the American press?
Meanwhile, a reader emails: “I’ll tell you what I find impressive. I’m watching the Fox news video about 15 minutes after the end of the event. The crowd has thinned out enough that you can see the ground and there is not a speck of trash on the grass. Absolutely clean.* To contrast, google ‘pictures of litter on the mall after the inauguration.’”
What does this mean for David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel?
* Some big generalizations in this piece and in the comments. Still, it does seem sort of like the Sept 12 protesters had mothers who taught them to clean up after themselves. Not much evidence of incipient terrorism there.
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