Outside of Obama's White House Window: Soggy Tea Bags And Festive Protests (Joe Rothstein's Commentary)

April 15, 2009

By Joe Rothstein
Editor, EINNEWS.COM

Call me a sentimental softy, but I love America on days like this.

The rain poured down. Underfoot, slippery wet grass shared the turf with old fashioned mud.

The scene was Lafayette Park, directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. It's a big park, a couple of square blocks. So the few hundred protesters who gathered there today looked more like a company picnic than a political movement. In a city used to hundreds of thousands of marchers---and sometimes legions of angry, violent protests----today's demonstration caused barely a stir.

But if you love democracy, and the nation that's been its most worthy child, then you had to love today's scene.

What brought these people out in the pouring rain was a protest against President Obama's economic policies. Too much government spending. Too much debt being piled on for future generations. Too scary a prospect of higher taxes down the road. Hundreds of similar events were planned throughout the U.S. on this, April 15, tax day----coordinated by a loose confederation of conservative groups and promoted heavily by right wing media.

Organizers were supposed to symbolically dump a million tea bags on Lafayette Park's grass. But it seems that those organizers failed to get a permit. Some protesters brought a few stray tea bags from home and they lay in the dirt, soggy and forlorn around the edges of the action.

The other media highlight of the day was to have been a rally in front of the Treasury Department, next to the White House. But protest organizers didn't arrange for proper permits to do that, either. So all the activity remained in a small corner of the park.

Behind a sea of umbrellas, someone was speaking from a small platform. I never could see who was speaking, or hear what they were saying. There didn't seem to be a sound system.

But it didn't matter to most people, who just wandered around outside the speaking area, waving homemade signs, taking pictures of one another, and enjoying just being there----displaying their unity with the cause and kinship with fellow believers. Many wore Tea Party paraphernalia---caps, T shirts and sweatshirts--—created just for these few hours of protest. Despite the elements, it was a festive occasion.

My favorite sign just said “No More!” That seemed to be a reasonable message---allowing anyone to fill in the blanks and add whatever he or she considered most offensive.

Elinor Sinars, a smiling, cherubic woman from Alexandria, Virginia, told me that what finally motivated her to come to the protest was President Obama's seeming bow to the Saudi king. She said she'd never joined any public protest before.

Charla Quimby, a retired school teacher from Springfield, Virginia, said she had gone through the 1960s without becoming part of a protest movement---this was her first one, too. She was concerned that her students weren't getting accurate information from traditional media.

Don Dusenbury came from the nearby Shenandoah Valley. Had he considered not coming because of the rain? “No,” he told me. “That made it more important for me to come. I thought I might be the only one here.”

A young man wearing a suit and tie walked by us. Pretty dressed up for an occasion like this, I said. He told me his name was Sam Solo and he worked in finance in Bethesda, Maryland. He took time off of work to be here, he said. “I'm here because everything we do is taxed,” I asked whether he got a tax cut like 95% of all Americans as part of President Obama's stimulus plan. “That 95% is an artificial number,” he said.

While there was no mistaking the enthusiasm and dedication of those who turned out for the tax protests today, if latest polls are an accurate indicator, taxes are far from the concern of most Americans. Sixty-two percent of those questioned in a recent CNN poll approved of how President Obama is handling taxes. Only 11 percent said that taxes were the most important economic issue facing the country. Gallup this week found that more people considered their tax burden about right than at any time since 1956.

All that may be true in the aggregate. But for a few hours in Lafayette Park, those who do consider taxes and government spending their highest priority were together with a lot of soul mates, waving their placards at the White House, snapping each others' pictures to memorialize the experience and hoping that their presence would trigger enough other reactions elsewhere to change government policy.

They cared enough about the future of the country to be here. That's what people are supposed to do in a democracy. Maybe I'm just an old softy. But I love it.

(Joe Rothstein can be contacted at joe@einnews.com)