Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, August 30, 2010

Could Democrats Rally As Many As Beck Managed?

Estimates about the size of the crowd that attended Glenn Beck's atrocious "I Have A Scheme" Rally this weekend are heatedly disputated, as such things usually are. The range from CBS's estimate at just under 100,000 to just over 300,000 by both NBC and DC officials gives a clear indication that the rally was indeed quite a large one.

It is worth noting that even though the actual numbers told a factual story that should hearten them, wingnuts still can't help but lie insanely about the turnout, declaring it to be a half a million, a million, millions I tells ya, all fighting the obamafeminaziblackpanthacornislamofascist menace.

Whatever the numbers, the turnout was more impressive than Tea Partiers have recently managed to swing at their scattered crazytown gatherings, now that most of the Big Pharma and Insurance Company funds dried up when there was no longer any benefit to them in whomping up the appearance of grassroots antipathy to healthcare reform. No doubt their paid sponsorship of Beck's shindig in turn helps account for this latest, er, organic spontaneous groundswell of popular support.

Be all that as it may, given the media narrative endlessly mega-phoning Democratic demoralization and Republican enthusiasm coming into the mid-terms, the Beck rally offers an unwelcome data point for the Bad Guys to cough up into their hairball of conventional wisdom.

By the way, though the generic ballot polling doesn't exactly thrill me any more than anybody else, and I simply don't trust the Administration to do both the right and the sensible thing and come out with a game-changing Democratic Green Jobs Initiative Versus Republican Billionaire Bailouts Plan next month, still, I do want to point out that the correlated anti-incumbency media-narrative hasn't really lived up to the hype in the primaries, and that Democrats are going into the mid-term elections with a long-prepared much ballyhooed ground-game, with better, if dismal, approval than Republicans in spite of everything, as well as with comparatively better money on hand, and that these things aren't exactly chopped liver even if they aren't pixie dust either.

Anyway, I'm hearing lots of grousing about whether Democrats could get crowds comparable to even the lowball figures estimated for Beck's atrocity exhibition for any of our signature political issues (I doubt that the question includes the part where some archipelago of interested mega-corporations would pitch in to organize and promote the affair to the tune of millions of dollars because they care so much about windturbines or publicly financed elections or women's access to safe and legal abortions, but I digress), all as a way of indulging in all liberals's favorite past-time of declaring pre-emptive defeat in the face of the frustrations of reformist stakeholder political processes constrained by the reality of the Senate filibuster, historically unprecedented levels of irresponsible GOP obstructionism, massively funded media misinformation organs, all in the immediate aftermath of flabbergasting fiscal and foreign policy crises.

And yet, to this question of whether we can get 100,000 to the Mall, I have this to say:

Ask me that question again when President Obama is administered the oath of office for his second term and the answer will be cheering back at you from horizon to horizon.

No comments: