How Did I Miss The Coverage Of This Event?

How Did I Miss The Coverage Of This Event?

The Tea Partiers went to DC. Depending on whose estimates you believe, tens of thousands--and perhaps as much as one million people--protested. (The one million people estimate is from the September 14, 2009 London Daily Mail.)

As many as one million people flooded into Washington for a massive rally organised by conservatives claiming that President Obama is driving America towards socialism.

The size of the crowd - by far the biggest protest since the president took office in January - shocked the White House.

Demonstrators massed outside Capitol Hill after marching down Pennsylvania Avenue waving placards and chanting 'Enough, enough'.

...

Some liberal websites and blogs are putting the number much lower, with estimates ranging anywhere from 20,000 to 70,000. Based on photographs and video footage of the event the numbers would appear to be much larger than those estimates. The ticketed area of the National Mall alone has a capacity of 240,000 and the crowd clearly filled that area and beyond. The public access area of the Mall holds nearly 950,000 and photographs of that area show it to be at or near capacity, although it has been reported that other groups were holding events in that area.

I keep hoping the left figures out what this means. When a million people are sufficiently motivated to show up in D.C. to make their voices heard, there are probably ten or twenty times that many that were just as upset, but couldn't take time off work, couldn't afford the travel costs (which are non-trivial, when include hotel accommodations), had other commitments, or didn't know that this was being organized. (I didn't know about it.)

And this is largely a right-wing movement. Unlike the left, we aren't rich, and big demonstrations really aren't our style. This is much more of a commitment for us than it for the left.

UPDATE: One of my readers was there, and says while it wasn't any two million people, it was huge, in the hundreds of thousands. I think the method used by the Daily Mail makes sense--so certainly in the high end of the hundreds of thousands. Enough to scare the Democrats witless. Another reader says that a guy had a small white cardboard sign on a long pole that read simply "For every person you see here, 9000 others wanted to come."