On the Ground at the Beck Rally

I had not even heard about the Beck Rally until about two weeks ago.  Normally I look on these sorts of events with a mild curiosity, but rarely does this curiosity force me to get off my duff and actually make the 30-minute trip down to the Mall from my home in suburban Maryland, along the dreaded Green Line.  But today would be different, as I had already made plans to enjoy one of the favorite pastimes of the East Coast Liberal Elite: going to a museum.  As I’d be down there anyway, I decided to head down a little early and check things out.

To be fair to rally attendees, there were plenty of trucks in the College Park Metro station garage, making it immediately obvious that Beck supporters aren’t as scared of traveling in areas where they “don’t know where [they] are.”  As Maryland is an overwhelmingly liberal state, the fact that there was an overrepresentation of trucks and bumper stickers saying, “NObama” was a pretty good indication that we’d had some Beck supporters head into the city from there.

I didn’t make it down there until about noon, right when the rally should be reaching its crescendo (it was slated to finish at 1PM).  Exiting at Archives, I headed East down the Mall towards the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial.  At first the mall was rather empty save for a few people who had cut out early walking the other way.  You could spot them immediately, with their rally shirts or wrapped in their Gadsden flags (which incidentally I’ve been hearing really pisses some people in the Navy off).  As I approached the Washington Monument, we passed a small set-up with a picture of King and speakers that appeared to be playing a recording of the speeches from the day of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

As we reached the Washington Monument, you could see the first groups of rally attendees, mostly shuttling back and forth from the rally, although some had camped out on the high ground of the monument’s mound to get a better vantage point.  Continuing eastbound we crossed 17th street before hitting real “crowds.”  I met up with a friend there who, along with my wife, was sporting an Obama t-shirt.  We met several locals who were, as one person put it, “there to see the freak show.”  Additionally we actually met one liberal in the crowd who had driven down from Pennsylvania to see what was going on.

All in all, I’ll say the crowd was respectful of our display of opposing opinions. I heard a couple people scoff at my wife’s shirt, but nothing overly disrespectful or vulgar.  I’ve heard reports that some counter-protesters got into minor scuffles or tense moments with rally attendees, but to their credit, the attendees were largely respectful.  Granted, we weren’t holding up a sign like this guy.

After a few minutes poking around the edges of the crowd near the WWII Memorial, we decided to wade in a bit, and I was surprised to see that the crowd really didn’t spill over to the sides at all; the grass around the WWII Memorial was pretty empty.  On the reflecting pool side of the memorial, however, things started getting a little packed, and we continued up to there before deciding against heading further into the crowd, lest we block our escape should they cry for liberal blood (I kid, I kid).

We stood there for a little bit, listening to Beck’s speech, trying to gauge the reaction of the crowd.  I was a little surprised to hear the religious connotations to the speech. It was not overly political, a theme that apparently I was not the only one to pick up on.  Indeed Beck was careful to criticize both Republicans and Democrats alike when he strayed to politics.  In fact, of the 10 minutes or so I really listened to (admittedly not a lot), I thought his pronouncements were relatively mild.  He asked people to be charitable, brought up issues with people paying for healthcare bills and generally seemed to call for things that even a liberal could love.  When one of my group remarked jokingly that it sounded like Beck was calling for socialism, people around us tilted their heads a little oddly, but you could tell that while they didn’t quite think Beck was calling for socialism, perhaps they weren’t getting what they were looking for out of the rally.

Indeed, on my way home on the metro later that day, I overheard a group that had been at the rally, driving all the way in from Ohio, lamenting that the crowd was not “whipped up.”  This was universally the reaction amongst those who had attended with me, that the crowd seemed subdued.  We discussed what this could mean.  Would this equate to lower turnout?  More disorganization?  Burnout?  It might be tempting to think that, but with people driving so far just to attend a rally, there is a certain amount of inherent dedication to the cause that one must assume.  I was left thinking it was hard to read what that meant.

The man on the train also made another comment that I thought was interesting.  He said that Beck’s speech was essentially just a rehash of the kinds of things he says daily.  Apparently this man “listens” to Beck daily, although I don’t know in what capacity, on television or radio.  That comment is interesting in that this religious push that the media seems to be registering may have been going on longer than we’ve noticed, just coming to the fore recently.  I used to listen to Beck years ago on talk radio in Philadelphia (yeah, I liked getting my blood pressure up), and he was pretty secular back then as I remember it.  I always thought he was kind of the goofy guy who didn’t really think things out too well and made funny voices.  I can’t say I thought he was ever going to go this far.

The general mood as we trudged away from the rally a little early to beat the crowd seemed to be that people liked it.  It was a subdued like, but people seemed happy with the message.  Again, it’s hard to read what that will mean for the November elections.  One amusing sticker I saw on some people was, “I can see November from my house.”  Heh.  Well played.

As a last note, I’d like to discuss crowd size estimates.  First I’ll say I think crowd size estimates are a little ridiculous in that everyone seems to seem to want to use them to legitimize or delegitimize an event.  I think that’s stupid.  As much as I disagree with the people out at the rally, I have to give them credit for not just getting out of their house, but in many cases coming in from all over the place (the furthest travel I saw direct evidence of was from Minnesota, that’s impressive).  If you can get thousands of people together, you should be applauded.  Now certainly things change a little when you break a million.  With a million people you need to stop and say, “wow, people are pretty pissed.”  But that doesn’t take away from the achievement of getting all the people they did.  I have participated in protests far smaller than this rally on the mall, and I don’t consider the cause I supported any less legitimate than theirs.

That said, out of some sense of things being “right” or to be pedantic, I’ll throw my observations into the mix as regards crowd size.  First, let’s start with the ridiculous, and throw those out.  According to Newser’s round up of estimates, Michelle Bachmann said that, “we’re not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today.”  That’s utterly preposterous, and along the lines of the whole “is Fox stupid or evil” thing, it’s hard to decide if she’s trying to be deliberately obtuse or if she’s just a moron.  The Obama inauguration paralyzed the city, clogged the entire mall, not just the portion past 17th St NW, and has been estimated at between 800,000 and 1.8 million (pretty big swing, huh?).  It is not possible that this rally even was a quarter as big.  Flat out.

My own completely irrelevant guesstimate was 100k, a number I pulled completely out of my ass as a guess while we were there.  CBS news seems to be saying 78-98k, which I would believe.  ABC and NBC have said the “100s of thousands” was a possible estimate, although I believe NBC said either 10s or 100s of thousands (pretty big swing again, huh?).  Fox, unsurprisingly, uncritically took Beck’s estimate (at least according to Newser they did) of 500k people, which again is just flat out wrong.  If I was going to adjust my range based on the estimates and what I saw that day, I’d say 80-150k people.  Since it didn’t even really cross 17th St NW and did not spill over to the sides very much and people weren’t standing in the reflecting pool, it just can’t be that much.  But again, that’s more in a sense of pedantic correctness than for political reasons.  It beat the pants off of any protest I’ve attended there as regards attendance.  🙂

If anyone is interested, I have a few more photos not shown here on my Flickr page.

Added: Here’s an overhead shot of the mall to consider when thinking about the crowd size estimate:

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q….