In a way, perhaps. No, President “I Won” hasn’t proven to be the post-partisan “new politics”political messiah his campaign promised, but no rational human being could have expected that he would be; it’s simply not in the cards for a politician to come along and bring consensus between the parties (though if he were actually trying to build coalitions and create compromises rather than steering such a partisan course, we might be closer). More seriously, though, he can’t even unite his own party, which is why his domestic agenda has had such a rocky course of late despite Democratic dominance on the Hill.
What our community-organizer president does seem to be doing, though, is uniting and inspiring large chunks of the grassroots. To be sure, lately he’s been uniting and inspiring them against him, but hey, you can’t have everything. I was amazed to hear predictions that the Tea Party movement’s March on Washington would draw hundreds of thousands of people; the House leadership even put out a memo projecting two million participants, but I figured Glenn Reynolds and Moe Lane were right:
I think they’re floating huge numbers—two million? are you kidding?—so that they can paint it as a disappointment if we see “only” hundreds of thousands. . . .
Two million would be about double the turnout of Obama’s inauguration. I don’t believe the Dems really expect that.
Usually, when it comes to politics, if you go with the cynicism, it will get you where you need to be. Not this time. In fact, media estimates do indeed have the 9/12 Tea Party in D.C. pushing two million people—the police estimate, though lower, still had the count at 1.2 million—and from the pictures and the stories, it isn’t hard to believe. At the top of the page, you can see a picture from Mary Katherine Ham, courtesy of the Instapundit.
I liked Professor Reynolds’ comment on the Daily Mail article I linked above:
So maybe I was wrong to be so skeptical. But cut it in half and it’s still a huge number. And this is priceless: “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.’”
The mind boggles. More people descended on D.C. today to protest the president’s socialist agenda than came for his inauguration—possibly twice as many—and that was a huge event. No wonder Wall Street is confident the government takeover of health care is dead.