NATIONAL REVIEW REPORTS ...

Saturday, September 12, 2009

NRO at the 912 March [Mark Hemingway]

As a journalist who wears his cynicism like a badge of honor, to say that today's tea party protest wildly exceeded my expectations would be an understatement. I've yet to see a reliable estimate of the crowd size and the cops seemed bound and determined to keep any photographers away from any high vantage points, but I'd be shocked if it wasn't well into six figures. I've heard crowd-size estimates ranging from 350,000 to 1.5 million — the latter seems overly optimistic, but even the former figure would still be incredibly impressive. The march wasn't supposed to begin until eleven, but this was the scene at Freedom Plaza when we arrived at ten:

So many people showed up they couldn't contain everybody in the plaza, so they just started the march early to make room. As for the composition of the crowd, well I personally spoke to people from Ohio, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Idaho, Alaska, Delaware, Tennessee, Nevada, California, Montana, as well as Virginia and Maryland, natch. (And I'm probably forgetting a few.) What also bears noting is that a lot of people came by bus — and of the people that came to the march by bus, alomst all came on privately chartered buses organized by someone they knew. I asked one guy, who came up from South Carolina with 160 people on three buses, who put his trip together. He laughed and said, "My neighbor." Can we drive a stake through the astroturf claim now?

Another interesting detail about the march — it was filled with immigrants. I'm pretty sure every Cuban in a thousand mile radius was there, helpfully explaining to everyone who would listen that Cuba's vaunted free health care system involves shoddily trained doctors and bringing your own linen to the hospital. I also spoke to angry immigrants from England and Ireland, appalled the country was slouching toward socialized medicine.

But perhaps the most interesting thing about the crowd was how friendly and civil it was. It was also a fun crowd — to the well endowed redhead in the "Boobs Czar" T-shirt, I doff my cap to you m'lady. There was some concern that media attention would focus on a few fringe cranks. Well, out of what had to be hundreds of thousands, I saw two, count 'em, birther signs in hours of wandering around. (I did, however, see one person holding up a sign expressing concern about "Merovingians" running the country. With birthers and truthers, I didn't know there were still that many people concerned about the illuminati — old skool conspiracy theorizin' represent!) But overall it was an undeniably sober and informed crowd, especially in comparison to your standard left-liberal protest march. These people have jobs, are infuential in their communities and you can be darn sure they plan on voting next November.

Anyway, as Kathryn already noted, my wife and I took several pictures of the march. Some of these were in my wife's twitter feed that Kathryn linked below, but for the sake of convienence and you non-twitter users, I've corralled a bunch of photos of the crowd and their signs after the jump.