RSS Feed Menu“Are you with ACORN?”
Two questions into my interview with a woman from Georgia, those words cross her lips. I responded: “No, ma’am, I’m a writer with FrumForum.com. We’re a center-right website. We oppose Obama!”
“Well, alright, then. I want Congress to hear this: No TARP, no bailout, no cap-and-trade, no socialist healthcare, no healthcare paying for abortions, no czars!”
Another woman said: “We want less government. Get out of our lives! Get rid of the czars that are Communist. No healthcare, the — the cap-and-trade, no stimulus! There’s no transparency!”
And then: “Balance the checkbook, give Medicare to those who need it, and get government out of my healthcare!”
Sarah Palin was without a doubt the unsaid queen of the 9/12 march. Of the many people I interviewed, about a dozen expressed solid support for a Palin candidacy, with all of the others at least open to supporting her.
Many were caught up in the fervor of Joe Wilson’s recent outburst. At moments, it seemed as if every other person was holding a “You Lie” sign. Joe Wilson, indeed, was a name I heard with much greater frequency than Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee (whose name crossed no one’s lips), and Tim Pawlenty. Floated names did include, however, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck.
“All eyes are on Sarah Palin,” a man said. “Without her, McCain would have lost in a landslide.”
“Palin is from outside the Beltway. They hate her down here in D.C., and that’s why we need her,” one woman said to me.
“Quitting as governor was so smart,” another man said. “She got her leg out of a political beartrap. They were trying to sink her up in Alaska.”
Palin for President pins, shirts, and even signs were constant. Among those with whom I spoke who were committed to a candidate, she was the only name who came up. Her anti-Washington credibility overwhelmed them.
“She has ethics and moral values, she’s pro-life, she knows what she stands for and she speaks with integrity,” one protester added.
But Palinmania wasn’t everywhere.
More often, the crowd seemed utterly disillusioned with the entire batch of politicians available. To them, both parties had completely lost their ways and were committed to what Glenn Beck identifies as progressivism: the idea that government should shape society, rather than the reverse.
“It might be Sarah Palin, we’ll see. But I’ll say for now: whoever is committed to fiscal responsibility.”
“Whoever follows the Constitution!”
“Anyone who can beat this gang in Congress right now!”
Indeed, the gang in Congress right now was a constant target of ire.
“They don’t read their own bills, they can’t even handle Cash for Clunkers, they’re trampling over the Constitution, and we want to stop it! They don’t listen to we the people!” a man from Tennessee explained. “They can’t even run Amtrak, but they want to run healthcare?”
“We want Joe the Plumber, we want Suzie the Waitress. We want people with real lives. We’re sick to death of politicians and we’re sick to death of lawyers!” added another.
“We have no leader right now. For now, this is a citizen’s movement. They must hear us. They work for us. The people have to lead this.”
As an ubiquitous sign at the rally read: “Don’t tread on me.”
I approached a man holding a gigantic sign bearing the word “Jesus.” “What brought you out here today?” I asked, and the man rattled off a list of offenses: cap-and-trade, the debt, the deficit, Obamacare.
“What does your sign have to do with that, if I may ask?” I replied.
“Well, first, look at your shirt. What’s on it?,” he asked. “Don’t look, but tell me what’s on it.”
“Well… it’s a dragon, hovering over a boat or something, across some mountains,” I responded.
“Right. A dragon. A serpent. It represents Hell.”
With that, he pointed to a woman walking by and said “What does this sign mean to you?”
“Jesus. My Lord and Savior, who died on the cross to save me from sin,” she answered.
“Do we know each other?” he asked her, to verify that she was not with his party, but I interrupted: “Wait, wait. That’s fine, but what I wanted to know was the sign’s relevance to today’s rally.”
“Well, we’re a Christian nation founded on Christian principles, and we need to get back to those,” the man responded.
“Jesus died,” the woman added, “so we could be free. We’re having that taken away from us.” She walked away, but the man continued: “Have you read the Gospel of John?” I said that I had. “Well, read it again. Five times this time. And don’t think of yourself. Read it carefully and ask yourself: who is this man? Who is this man? Because he must be either a liar, a lun — .” I again interrupted him and noted: “Yes, yes, C.S. Lewis’ trilemma. I’m familiar with all of this. He’s a good writer, but I’m not a believer.”
A woman I’d addressed earlier struck a similar tone. “Obama opposes the Bible. The Constitution is an extension of the Bible, because it was written by God-fearing men.” This woman, one-half of a couple that had come down from Michigan, was fairly elderly. Her husband added: “We’re seeing our freedoms taken away. We’re old. We’re afraid of the death panels. At first I was worried just about my grandchildren, but now we’re worried for us, too. But today’s turnout — I didn’t know whether it’d be one-thousand or whatever number of people, but this is amazing. It’s the answer to a prayer.”
One college-aged woman I spoke with was concerned with the next generation: “Young people have no idea what’s going on in this country. They don’t know the truth. I have to be a representative for our generation. I don’t want our rights taken away. They’re trying to take away free speech, our right to choose healthcare, ‘Under God’ from the dollar bill… that’s the way it’s always been. You take away God, and you hand over the United States to Satan. This country will go straight to Hell.”
I came to sympathize with the protesters I met. Their hearts are in the right place. The figures of the American Revolution we remember are George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. Forgotten are the men who knew nothing of political philosophy or military tactics, but were ordinary people who just wanted to live free.
“Throw the bums out!,” one man exclaimed. “They’re wasting our children’s future. I want my children to have liberty, to be free.”
“I never thought I’d be protesting at my age,” a woman from Michigan told me. “But I had to come. It means too much to me. This is for my grandchildren. I want them to know that I did something for freedom.”
sinz54 // Sep 13, 2009 at 3:59 pm
sftor1: surrounded and mandated by a rabble
Rabble?
You left-wingers INVENTED rabble.
Take a look at YOUR rabble. Here:
http://www.zombietime.com/breasts_not_bombs/
And here:
http://www.zombietime.com/hillary_sf_office_topless_protest/
And here:
http://www.zombietime.com/sf_rally_february_16_2003/
And here:
http://www.zombietime.com/sf_anti-war_rally_oct_27_2007/my_country_piss_on_thee/
But that was when you were out of power.
But now that you’ve got a left-wing Administration in power, anyone who dissents from them must be “rabble.”
As George Orwell noted: You left-wingers display a contempt for the working-class unexampled for centuries past, and you do it in the name of socialist egalitarianism.
That’s a neat trick.
But you pull it off quite well.
Chekote // Sep 13, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Oh please. Even after 2004 there were people claiming that Bush stole the election. Like I said liberals can dish it out but can’t take it. I am all for moving on. But the phoney outrage from the left has go to go.
SFTor1 // Sep 13, 2009 at 4:36 pm
Chekote says: “Oh please. Even after 2004 there were people claiming that Bush stole the election.”
Joseph Kennedy Jr. had a long piece about that in Rolling Stone magazine, specifically the things that took place under Ohio. It was well researched and provided some disturbing information, but it never rose to the level of a real indictment of the election result.
As long as Chekote agrees that Barack Obama is our legitimate President I am all for moving on too. I think he does. I’m not asking for a confirmation.
SFTor1 // Sep 13, 2009 at 4:38 pm
in Ohio, of course.
Chekote // Sep 13, 2009 at 4:38 pm
When did I ever said he wasn’t the legitimate president? Of course, he is.
Observer // Sep 13, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Little victories.
anniemargret // Sep 13, 2009 at 6:37 pm
Looking and reading the signs and listening to these and other ‘teabaggers’ one hears over and over again that they ‘want THEIR country back!”
It’s not a stretch to see why young people want to run as far as they can from this or why the majority of them would never vote Republican.
These people are royally pissed….pissed that the 64 million Americans voted in a liberal from a minority. They want 50s America again, back to that exclusive small tent party that made them feel comfortable. Someone needs to tell them that that dysfunctional America is not coming back. It’s 2009, not 1959.
And they call themselves ‘Christians?” They have disgracefully distorted the teachings of Christ-wielding THEIR brand of religion like a cudgel, slamming anyone who even remotely thinks differently from them, while screaming that their ‘freedoms’ are being taken away. Sounds more like religious fascism to me.
How in heaven’s name can you take these people seriously? They act entitled. They lost in ‘08 after this county got fed up with Bush/Cheney/Rovian politics and their devisive and dangerous culture wars. They weren’t screaming about the trillion dollar deficits when Bush created them, right?
THEIR country? I think not. It’s OUR country.
We keep hearing there are only a ‘few kooks’ among them, but I don’t believe it. It sure keeps looking like more and more this is the face of the GOP.
ottovbvs // Sep 13, 2009 at 6:54 pm
……We’ll forget for the moment that Washington, Jefferson and Madison were poles apart politically………these people are basically Hoftstadter’s 100 percenters…….freakers on the fringe of politics……but the Republican base……I’ll leave Chek to decide whether or not they represent a viable future for the GOP.
rbottoms // Sep 13, 2009 at 7:32 pm
I’ve seen this movie:
Aragorn : President Barrack Obama
Grima Wormtongue : Glenn Beck
Treebeard : Edward Kennedy
Theoden : The Democrats
Sauron : The Far Right
Saruman : Sean Hannity
Gimli : Vice President Biden
Nasgul : The Birthers
Galadriel : Michelle Obama
Sackville – Baggins- The Republicans
Uruk-Hai : Redstate
sinz54 // Sep 13, 2009 at 7:47 pm
anniemargaret:
When one party’s ideas have been dominant for an entire generation, and then suddenly that party is swept from office, its supporters are likely to be outraged. They’ve lived most of their adult lives under governments that catered to them; and now suddenly they find themselves on the outs.
Someone who was born after 1965 lived his entire adult life under the assumptions of Reaganism (even Clinton made his peace with those assumptions eventually). They’ve never known life under a doctrinaire liberal Administration. We hadn’t had one since 1965. So suddenly, what they long believed was their worst nightmare–revived doctrinaire liberalism–is back with a vengeance. No wonder they’re furious.
I heard similar anger and despondency expressed by liberals, after Carterism gave way to Reaganism in the 1980s, ending some 40 years of New Deal liberalism’s ascendancy. It was the same story: An entire generation had grown up revering New Deal liberalism; and now suddenly, it was being replaced by something else, something they had long been taught to regard as alien. Blacks in particular were reportedly “terrified” at the prospect of a Reagan presidency. For years, blacks had been carefully taught to equate conservatism with the Ku Klux Klan, and now conservatism had actually won an election.
You can search the Google News archive (great resource, btw) for yourself to refresh your memory.
SFTor1 // Sep 13, 2009 at 8:03 pm
When seen from the outside the difference between most Republican and Democratic Administrations are slight. Bush stood for a massive expansion of health care expenditures and expands government reach like no one since FDR; Obama ends up defending many Bush War on Terror policies and running an economic policy that was a direct continuation of GWB; and the list goes on.
The idea that there is a stability-threatening sea change borders on the absurd. There is no big socialist wave washing over the country when the Democrats take over. This country is solidly right-leaning politically from an international point of view, not matter who is in charge.
It is political theater.
rbottoms // Sep 13, 2009 at 8:07 pm
I heard similar anger and despondency expressed by liberals, after Carterism gave way to Reaganism in the 1980s, ending some 40 years of New Deal liberalism’s ascendancy. It was the same story: An entire generation had grown up revering New Deal liberalism; and now suddenly, it was being replaced by something else, something they had long been taught to regard as alien. Blacks in particular were reportedly “terrified” at the prospect of a Reagan presidency. For years, blacks had been carefully taught to equate conservatism with the Ku Klux Klan, and now conservatism had actually won an election.
Thanks for the history lesson, and yes we were quite worried. What destroyed any hopes for blacks coming to regard conservatism as a possible home, since we are overwhelmingly a conservative church going populace, were two things: Apartheid and the MLK Birthday, followed by welfare reform and Affirmative Action.
Reagan’s stance on the first two issues ensured virtually no 18 year old black man or woman was going to throw the lever for the GOP no matter what they offered.
Clinton took welfare reform off the table and affirmative action, despite the wailing about it on the right barely touches the loves of most black folks. Firefighters, police, and until recently college admissions were about the only time it was an issue.
When the economy is in a more normal state I am in the top 10% of wage earners in this country, and even in to doldrums my wife and me have done well most of the last 10 years. So taxes are something I care about, but I don’t care about it to the exclusion of all else.
George Bush the elder said goodbye to black voters again with the Bob Jones University issue and the Confederate flag controversy. Even McCain wimped out on both counts in 2000.
The idea that special goodies from Uncle Sam are what keeps us voting Democrat is silly. Everyone black or white gets unemployment, the welfare rolls are the smallest in decades, and affirmative action is on a path to going away in the no too distant future.
No, we have a brand new reason to despise the GOP. A member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans breaks over 200 years of tradition to heckle the first black president and is rewarded with hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations with Beck, Hannity, and Limbaugh cheering him on.
Meanwhile a howling mob challenges the very citizenship of the same president with barely a peep for mainstream Republican politicians. In fact the birthers are receiving a wink & nod support from more than a few of them.
Say bye, bye to that vote for another 20 years.
midcon // Sep 13, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Well, I um..happen to be walking across the mall (I was headed over to a federal building for a meeting). It wasn’t really a short cut because of all the people but it was all festive and stuff, so off I went. I recall my predominate thought was exactly what the Alex’s article communicated to me – all sound bites and sloganeering. Yeah, I know it was a protest/rally and that’s the way those things go. But from what I can tell about what Alex’s conversations with folks, they responded with slogans suchs as ““Balance the checkbook, give Medicare to those who need it, and get government out of my healthcare!” Isn’t giving Medicare to additional folks and balancing the checkbook sort of contradictory? And doesn’t the government run Medicare?
Still it was a decent rally by Washington DC standards; although it did gum up the Metro for awhile. The sidewalk vendors at least were grateful for the additional business since the tourists have left and the kids are back in school. Still, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry that many of our citizens have no comprehension of how this country is governed and how programs like Medicare operate, including the concept that their taxes pay the cost of Medicare. What they should be suffering from is cognitive dissonance. Instead it seems to be either naïveté, willfull ignorance, or rationalization. Regardless, my optimism regarding the governed and the governors continues to wane.
Observer // Sep 13, 2009 at 9:37 pm
“For years, blacks had been carefully taught to equate conservatism with the Ku Klux Klan…”
…and conservatives were, sadly, the best teachers.
jabbermule // Sep 14, 2009 at 9:51 am
Sigh – this is why I was hoping and praying that the first black president would be a Republican. If that were the case, people wouldn’t be accused of racism every time they disagreed with the president on matters of policy.
sinz54 // Sep 14, 2009 at 9:55 am
rbottoms:
Evidently you haven’t read any of my earlier posts on the subject of the black vote. (I’ve been here since NM’s inception; you showed up later.)
I do not expect blacks to vote for the GOP in significant numbers.
I would point out, however, that for some 50 years at least before the 1960s, powerful white conservative Democrats from the South were dominant in the Democratic Party. Can you explain why blacks didn’t mind sharing the Dem Party with the likes of Lester Maddox, George Wallace, Robert Byrd (former KKK member), John Stennis, and even Strom Thurmond (who was a Democrat till 1964)? Blacks didn’t think that these white Southerners were constantly being courted?
How did a coalition of northern Blacks and southern Whites stay together in the Dem Party for decades?
SFTor1 // Sep 14, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Sinz:
White Southerners were Democrats because they wanted nothing to do with Lincoln’s Party. The Democratic Party was also the Civil Rights Party, as it was JFK and RFK who got civil rights legislation enacted. Hence the Dems got the black vote.
Finally Karl Rove came around to tell the white southern vote that they belonged in the GOP, because the GOP believes in Jesus, hates gays, and loves guns. So now you have all the Southern bigots in your party.
agentprovocateur // Sep 14, 2009 at 9:16 pm
This is completely off topic, but I notice that ottovbvs is back. Please correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t sinz54 crowing that the president’s recent “failure” and sinz54’s superior arguments had driven ottovbvs away? Looks like the only person who has been driven away was that barking dog who was permanently muzzled. Speaking of subz54, you do realize that blacks really didn’t vote in significant numbers for Democrats until the 1960s, right? While the Democratic courting of the black vote did start with FDR, it didn’t reach its fruition until the decade when Civil Rights laws were championed by Democratic presidents. Not coincidentally, this is also when all those Southern Democrats started leaving the party in droves for the GOP.
Rockerbabe // Sep 15, 2009 at 7:29 pm
Sad commentary from worked up citizens about essentially nothing. These very citizens didn’t seem so worked up about the kids and grandkids when Dubya lied to get us into an unnecessay, immoral war. Where was all the outrage over that money? Now, we are trying to fix the insurance industry so they don’t victimize the average citizen and these people are outraged? Stupidity, sheer stupidity.