Yesterday I searched in vain for some authoritative accounting of the number of teabaggers that showed up for the demonstrations yesterday. It should certainly have occurred to me to check with Nate Silver at 538.com, which I did today. He says the total, across the entire country, was 262,025, with some smaller venues yet to check in. So, if we want to be generous that means that possibly 300,000 people showed up around the country.
That’s a lot of people, but it sort of pales in comparison to the numbers that the media (particularly Fox) routinely ignore when the protestors occupy the left side of the political fence. Estimates of the number of protestors at the NYC Republican convention in 2004 run anywhere from 120,000 to 900,000, with the truth probably being somewhere in the middle. That’s in just one city, so it sort of crushes the top crowd at any one teabag event (7,000 in Atlanta). The second Bush inaugural drew far more than the puny 1,000 that made it to Washington for the teabag event. That meager number is surprising, as you would expect the GOP Congresspeople would have ordered their staffs to attend. Of course, the total pales into insignificance next to the numbers that took to the streets to protest against the coming war in Iraq. Truly, the only numbers in which these protests excelled was in the Media Attention Department, with the New London Day (Front page headline: Tax Day Erupts in Protests), taking its lead from Fox. More sober media types, like the New York Times and the Globe, were more evenhanded, pretty much ignoring the teabaggers as they ignored the anti-war and anti-Bush folks.
Among those seeking to capitalize on all this incoherent rage was our former Congressman, Rob Simmons, who apparently feels that he has something to gain by pandering to folks who have a cumulative IQ approaching that of your average dog. Yet another example of the weird asymmetry of American politics. While Democrats run away from a huge percentage of their base, Republicans fall all over themselves to pander to the most extreme segment of theirs. In this case, as others have pointed out, they may have a tiger by the tail. These folks don’t have a cause, they merely have emotions. Simmons and his ilk believe they can direct that anger where they see fit, but it may not work out that way. This is nothing new for Simmons. In 2000 he shamelessly exploited what he knew were baseless fears about the Mashantucket attempt to annex land to their reservation.
I have one snarky question I’d love to have answered. How did all these folks, who are allegedly upset about their taxes (which are, for most of them, about to go down) get the time off from their jobs to go to a protest on a Wednesday afternoon?
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