Morning Rehash: NYC Protests

The pre-RNC protests in New York were a heartening display, both for the high level of organization and for the outpouring of anti-Bush sentiment. No doubt the Republicans will try to paint this as the mere ravings of the dreaded Liberal Elite, and wholly out of touch with the Real America. Wow -- half a million of the Liberal Elite, everyone from Liberal Elite babies to Liberal Elite grandparents to Liberal Elite union members to Liberal Elite Wall Street bankers, crammed onto Seventh Avenue between Chelsea and MSG.

That New York really is a helluva town.

It's events like this that make me really miss New York. I spent nineteen happy years living in the city (mainly the outer boroughs) or in the NJ suburbs, before moving away in 2000 to take a job elsewhere. I'm generally pleased with where I'm living now -- but it's no New York. I like to think that I would have been right out there, adding my voice to swell the ranks of the anti-Bush crowd. (Though in reality, I probably would have just been pissing and moaning about the traffic and the heat.)

I also like to think that the spectacle of 500,000 people of all ages, colors, and professions ranked out under the blistering East Coast sun, even in godless NYC, might be enough at least to give pause to those who hadn't yet thrown in their lot with the Bush/Cheney sham. But the press coverage of this event no doubt will depend heavily on geography. In the New York Times, it was of course a huge story, since it was in part a local one. On CNN's homepage this morning, by contrast, you would have been hard pressed to find much evidence that America's largest city had just played host to its biggest protest event since the Vietnam War. What we saw instead was a large amount of homepage real estate devoted to the runup to the RNC, with one link in smaller type noting "Democratic protests clog NYC streets." So, to CNN, apparently, it really was just a traffic story. Not surprisingly, the Washington Times chose to place its own story of the protest in smaller type below the big headline on Cheney's upstaged Ellis Island convention kickoff. The headline: "Thousands join protests in NY." Not bad; only off by two orders of magnitude. In the future, these Moonie headline writers may want to bear in mind that there's a rather substantial difference in connotative meaning between "thousands" and "hundreds of thousands."

Still, the protests did seem to overshadow much of the preliminary RNC eyewash, and served as the unofficial opening ceremonies of the convention. What were the Republicans thinking when they decided on their Gotham convention setting? Well, no doubt it seemed like a good idea at the time. Now they're in the uncomfortable position of having to demonize and distance themselves from the population of the city in which they've chosen to have their biggest and most important campaign photo-op. Not a situation I'd like to be in.