Dr. David Dunch had never been to a political demonstration before. Yet on Saturday Dunch, a surgeon who has practiced for 25 years in Youngstown, Ohio, found himself marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, wearing a white medical coat with a small American flag tucked into the breast pocket, explaining what’s wrong with President Obama’s national health care proposals.
“It’s a mistake,” Dunch says. “It’s going to result in ultimate rationing and limiting care to our elderly. We need universal access of patients with pre-existing illnesses. We need to open up the 50 states to all insurance plans. We need tort reform. We don’t have to trash the current system.”
Dunch has come here with his wife, who is a nurse, because he believes the president is “telling half-truths” by citing the support of the American Medical Association to suggest that most physicians favor Obamacare — when in fact the AMA represents a relatively small minority of doctors. The situation is enough to turn a private physician into a protester. “I’ve never been political before,” Dunch says. “This is atypical for me.”
Atypical for Washington, too. Hours before Saturday’s protest began, it was clear that the crowd of people opposing Obama’s big-government policies would be larger than many anticipated. There are no official estimates of how many attended, but there’s no doubt that the turnout, from the crush on Pennsylvania Avenue to the crowd at the West Front of the Capitol, was big — perhaps in the 100,000 range.
No one was more surprised at the show of force than some of the marchers themselves. “We did it!” cried one elated woman as she approached Pennsylvania Avenue. “Look at all these people!” A moment later, the crowd began to chant:
Yes we can!
Vote you out!
Yes we can!
Vote you out!
Yes we can!
Vote you out!
South Carolina Republican Sen. Jim DeMint was standing nearby, finishing a book signing outside a Starbucks. “You can’t say these are rich people, or these are insurance executives,” DeMint said. “These are family people, business people — these are real Americans.”
The most popular man in the crowd was one who wasn’t there: Rep. Joe Wilson, DeMint’s colleague in Congress from South Carolina, who blurted out “You lie!” during Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress last week. All through the crowd, there were signs — handmade, not the pre-printed ones handed out by activist groups at other rallies — saying things like YOU LIE! and JOE WILSON WAS RIGHT and JOE WILSON FOR PRESIDENT and WE’RE WITH WILSON.
“I think he just said the same thing that many Americans were yelling at their TV at about that point,” says Jonathan Hill, a tea party organizer from Anderson, S.C. “If it had been me, I don’t think I would have apologized for it. I think he was right.”
“Joe was smart to apologize in a hurry,” DeMint adds, “but the fact is, Joe was telling the truth. I’ve had hundreds of people today tell me he was speaking for them.”
Some people were animated by a single issue — health care, taxes, the Second Amendment. But in dozens of interviews with marchers, the picture that emerged was of people who believe things are racing out of control along a whole range of fronts in Washington, and that no one is representing their interests. Obama and the Democrats in Congress, they believe, are simply pushing too hard on too many things. It’s unlikely that there would have been a rally this size just about the stimulus, or just about cap-and-trade, or just about the takeovers of the auto companies, or even health care. But put them all together, and there is an enormous and growing fear that Obama and his allies are rushing to wreck the system.
So the protesters spent their own money and caught buses and came to Washington. And made their own signs. There were SILENT NO MORE banners. There was DON’T TAX ME, BRO! and WE NEEDED PROBLEM SOLVERS — WE GOT POWER GRABBERS and NO THANKS, I ALREADY HAVE A MESSIAH and perhaps the favorite, GRANDMA’S NOT SHOVEL-READY.
Some of the protesters had traveled farther than just the distance between their home town and Washington. Dr. David Levine, a psychiatrist from Rockford, Illinois, was Ramsey Clark’s volunteer press secretary when the ultra-liberal former U.S. attorney general ran for the Senate from New York in 1976. Now, Levine, wearing a faded NEWT GINGRICH 2008 t-shirt, was on the streets of Washington in a crowd of conservatives. What accounted for the change? “It started when liberals just stopped making sense to me,” Levine said. “I was listening to NPR, and nothing was making sense. So I started reading more and more conservative things, and here I am.”
For Christy Smith, who handles sales for a shipping company in Houston, this rally, and the tea party she attended in April, were the first time she had been to a protest since the early 1980s, when, as part of the Tulsa Peace Coalition, she tried to stop a U.S. military train carrying nuclear warheads bound for American Pershing II missiles in Europe. “I was a bit radical on the other side,” Smith says. “I’ve had a long journey.” Now, she worries about the nation’s debt and wants to see tort reform and term limits.
Their attitudes toward Obama himself are complicated. No one I met expressed hatred for the president. A few had voted for him, and others, like Christy Smith, said they were deeply moved when he was elected. Many others opposed him all along. But now, the predominant mood is deep distrust. They believe Obama will raise their taxes, that he will blow up the health care system, that he will weaken America’s defenses.
And they wonder who he is as a person. “The company you keep tells a lot about who you are,” says Tres Berden, a truck driver from Newark, New Jersey. “With all of those associations of his, from Rev. Wright to Van Jones — you don’t know those kind of people without being one.” Berden, one of the few African-Americans in the crowd, is a Democrat who now considers himself a libertarian. He voted for Obama, but quickly became disillusioned. “He isn’t the person he sold us,” Berden says.
You’ve probably heard descriptions of the marchers as crazies and haters and fanatics. Perhaps there were some in the crowd. Far more important, though, was the very presence of so many everyday Americans protesting in Washington, just eight months into unified Democratic control of the White House and Congress. What did Barack Obama and his party’s leadership on Capitol Hill do to bring doctors and truck drivers together in common cause on the streets of the nation’s capital? More than anything, these people are afraid that the new president is running the country off a cliff. They’re in no mood to remain silent now.
