How do you marginalize a significant protest against a politician or policy you sup port? Lowball the numbers, then dismiss participants as deranged and possibly dangerous kooks. In the case of Saturday’s massive 9/12 protest in Washington, done and done.
“Small protest,” popular lefty blogger Josh Marshall reported from his armchair, as an overflow crowd (at least 100,000, by my rough, unscientific estimate) filled the 1.5 miles between the south White House and the US Capitol, spilling out all over the National Mall and even down the street to Union Station.
The Center for American Progress, whose president headed up the new administration’s transition team, warned that the rally was marred by signs that “were often racist, radical portrayals of Obama.” Among the dozen or so pieces of evidence? A placard claiming, “Ayn Rand is right,” and one of President Obama with the caption, “When his lips move . . . he’s lying.”
If calling the commander-in-chief a liar is the new racism, then Americans have been boiling in hate since long before we, uh, overwhelmingly elected a black president. I seem to recall a “Bush lied” sign or two in the massive (and impressive) protests at the 2004 Republican convention in New York, and then there was that whole “I did not have sex with that woman” thing from the fella before.
What’s really going on is not hard to grasp: Even before massive proposed overhauls of health care and energy, the president’s first wave of big-government policies — auto bailouts, Wall Street welfare and just-spend-it economics — are prompting a passionate pushback.
But Obama’s supporters in the media would rather write it off as racism. “Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it,” The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd wrote this weekend. Tea Party activists, the LA Times’ Tim Rutten theorized Saturday, want to “convert the GOP into an almost exclusively white, zealously religious, mostly Southern party.”
I went out into the protest looking for these Southern racists, but all I kept finding were people from New Jersey, Connecticut and even Washington state (in addition to Alabama, North Carolina and Virginia) who each shared the same central complaint: The federal government is spending too much money, racking up too much debt and intruding too much into American life.
At a huge gathering of mostly white, mostly right-of-center Americans, I saw not one sign that so much as referenced affirmative action (an issue that has largely disappeared from American politics, even while the policy remains). I know there were at least two Confederate flags amid the perhaps thousands of “Don’t Tread on Me” banners, but I didn’t see any.
I asked everyone I interviewed whether they thought Obama was a legitimate president, and the only person to take the birth-certificate bait was a self-described Democrat (who also said he voted for the Constitution Party’s Chuck Baldwin in 2008). In all, the rally didn’t begin to resemble what The New York Times’ Gail Collins described as the “range” of tea party activists — “from geeky Ron Paulists who obsess about the money supply to conspiracy theorists who believe that Barack Obama is a noncitizen.”
Sure, it’s fair to wonder where these protesters were when Bush was expanding government at levels not seen since Lyndon Johnson. But the people I talked to had almost no kind words to say about W., and many explicitly warned that any Republican hoping to benefit from this backlash will have to re-embrace the fiscal discipline that the GOP abandoned en masse over the previous decade.
We will see more charges of racism and even fascism from those instinctively revolted by the sight of white limited-government activists protesting a black big-government president. Every stupid sign saying, “Hitler gave great speeches, too,” will be seized on even more than the “BusHitler” banners were back when people still protested the Iraq war. (There are few political hypocrisies richer than the hilariously inconsistent way both left and right treat public protests.)
But even if the National Mall had been empty on Saturday, the Obama administration would still be facing an uncomfortable truth: Poll numbers clearly indicate an increasing public alarm about government spending and debt. New York Times columnists may be able to dismiss a large, coherent and peaceful anti-government protest eight months into Obamanomics, but you can bet that the administration sure doesn’t.
Matt Welch is editor in chief of Reason. matt.welch@reason.com