THE “ONE NATION” MARCH AND THE “RALLY TO RESTORE SANITY Turning points forthe progressive movement?
(NATIONAL) -- Today is the date of the “One Nation” march and rally in Washington DC where liberal and progressive groups join at the National Mall in an event organizers say represents "the real needs" of America's working class.
Progressive groups hope to draw tens of thousands of supporters to the Mall in a massive show of force that will rival the conservative tea party movement.
Leah Doughtry, campaign director for One Nation Working Together, the coalition of 400 groups organizing the event, says the people who’ll be participating understand the key issues facing America.
The groups sponsoring today’s event want lawmakers in Washington to do more to create jobs and provide more help for those without work, provide Americans with high quality, affordable education and end racial profiling and other discrimination in the criminal justice system among other things.
The coalition is comprised of civil rights and human rights groups, unions, immigration advocates, gay rights groups and churches.
Ben Jealous, president of the NAACP, said the march will showcase working Americans, particularly minorities, whose voices have gone unheard in a political debate he claims has amplified the perceived strength of the Tea Party and the opinions of extreme commentators.
Jealous said his goal is to be an antidote to the Tea Party, to “make the mainstream of the country visible to itself."
But there is another rally scheduled for Washington later this month that may even have more eyes on it.
In just 29 days Comedy Central’s chief funny men, John Stewart and Steve Colbert, stage Stewart’s tongue-in-cheek "Rally to Restore Sanity" and Stephen Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" event in Washington DC.
The rally/march – or fun fest perhaps – comes on the heels, as today's event does, of conservative TV talk host Glenn Beck's more serious rally to “restore honor” last month which drew an estimated 87,000 people, according to CBS News which claims it did the only legitimate research quality count of Beck’s audience that day.
CBS says the company it hired to do the estimate claims Beck's crowd was somewhere between 87,000 and around 100,000 plus, give or take and that was with massive on air support from FOX News and people being bused in for free by Freedom Works, a right wing organization that has been in the background with money and strategic planning and consulting to support the Tea Part movement from the beginning.
Beck and others claim the turnout was in the hundreds of thousands.
Thus the unspoken question on many a lip this month is “Will Jon Stewart and Colbert – not to mention the One Nation rally today - draw a huge crowd, so huge that it will make Beck’s rally look like a kiddy car race by comparison?”
And if one or both of the events do outdraw Beck’s gathering by a country mile, what then does that say about the “silent majority” in America?
What does it say about Beck’s real strength as an opinion molder and agenda setter?
If Beck and Tea Party rallies show that Americans are sick and tired of the Obama government, will a thunderously larger turnout for Stewart and Colbert and possibly One Nation signal that even more Americans are sick and tired of the Glen Becks, Sara Palins and Tea Parties of the world?
Will a huge turnout energize voters for the November elections that could turn back the prospect of Democrats losing their majorities in Congress?
Will a huge turnout expose Beck and Palin for what many claim they are: small, extremist bit players who appear much more important than they really are because the media pays so much attention to their every move and utterance?
HOTEL RESERVATIONS IN D.C. UP SIGNIFICANTLY FOR STEWART-COLBERT
If it’s any indication as to how things might go for Stewart and Colbert, a small one paragraph piece in the Washington Examiner claims that a survey of Washington DC hotels shows a 25% increase in hotel reservations for Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity" and Stephen Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive" rallies, and that is reportedly more of an increase than Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor Rally" for the same comparative period.
And there’s one man who’s predicting Stewart & Colbert will pitch a shutout come October 30.
Jason Easely, in an op-ed piece on the left-wing supportive Politicususa notes that FOX News personality Steve Doocy and others have been attempting of late to play down the Stewart/Colbert effort, intimating the Stewart outing may be a PR disaster for him and Colbert by drawing a small crowd.
But Easley takes the view that the reason many FOX TV news talkers are trying to diminish Stewart’s efforts is because the folks at FOX are worried that Stewart’s outing will far outdraw the Beck gathering and thus diminish both Beck’s stature and FOX's stature as opinion makers and molders in the process.
“Fox News knows that if Stewart/Colbert outdraw Beck it is not only an embarrassment for them, but it also damages their delusional narrative about the Tea Party being some mass popular grassroots movement. If Jon Stewart manages to pull more moderates for a rally about toning it down, than Beck and Fox can pull for their Teabagger jihads, the Tea Party will look like the angry little fringe group that they are,” writes Easley .
Easley goes out on a limb so far as to say that Stewart and Colbert not only can outdraw Beck but it’s a sure bet they will outdraw Beck
Perhaps.
But one British report says the event will actually say more “about the state of progressive protest in the US today.”
The report in the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper says “Organizers of the (two) October rallies have a lot they could teach each other, and combining strategies could lead to a potent movement for change.”
It also says Americans are at “a crossroads in terms of the practice of dissent, with activists aching for something new. That's where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert come in.”
The report says that behind the farcical façade of the Stewart/Colbert rallies “Lies serious disgruntlement with the standard-issue political shenanigans of our times. Stewart and Colbert are appropriating the form of a protest event and subverting it with ironic intent. This is a concerted antidote to the professionalized think tank-ified gloom-and-doom-ism that – in their eyes – all too often passes for dissent in our shiny mediascape.”
And if the number of people who have vowed on Facebook to attend the rallies are any indication, says the report, predictions in some quarters of a low turnout might be premature.
“People are craving something different, and Comedy Central's one-two punch may well deliver it,” says the report.
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(source:skyvalleychronicle.com)
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