Protesters Come to Washington

A large crowd of Patriots descended on the nation’s capital last Saturday to voice their concern and displeasure with Washington’s out-of-control spending habits and interference with people’s lives. Estimates of the number of participants varied widely, from 70,000 to as many as two million — but more on that later.

This civil demonstration followed the message and the momentum of the Tea Parties from earlier this year. Placards called attention to a number of issues: chronic government overspending and taxation, nationalization of various industries, the general ineffectiveness of Congress, and the liberal perception that the Tea Party protest movement is a racist mob. Actually viewing the gathering, however, would shed some bright light on that perception. The crowd represented a broad cross section of the country, from senior citizens concerned about ObamaCare’s impact on their health care to college students worried about the tremendous debt their generation faces in the coming years, and everyone in between. They were polite to the police officers on street duty, and they left the Mall and streets significantly cleaner than attendees of Barack Obama’s January immaculation. Of course, if the larger media outlets aside from Fox News actually bothered to report on the march as opposed to simply offering their own opinions of it, these facts would be known.

There is no official figure of how many people actually attended the march. Liberal pundits stated earlier last week that two million or so protesters were expected. Their high estimate is a slick tactic employed in protest politics — pin high expectations on opponents, only to mock them when said “expectations” aren’t met. However, the low-end number of 70,000 is absurd. There are photos of portions of the crowd that alone contain at least that many people.

Charlie Martin of Pajamas Media pegged the actual size at around 850,000 after performing a series of calculations based upon known facts such as the size of the National Mall, National Park Service definitions of what constitutes a crowd (one person per five square feet), and the number of marchers who passed down Pennsylvania Avenue in a three-hour period. If this number is correct, then it was about the same size of the crowd that attended Obama’s inauguration. That event was originally estimated at two million but was later quietly reduced after careful study of satellite photos of the Mall.