Number of marchers at the tea party in Washington, DC: Everyone is wrong, no one is right

Glad someone has a sense of humor (Flickr user Progress Ohio)

How many people attended yesterday’s 9/12 protest in Washington, DC? The world may never know. But let’s face it. The number of attendees, it’s not that important. Counting the number of people who show up at a Washington, DC protest is almost as useful as counting the number of angels on the head of a pin, as they say.

Still. It’s funny to see the problem of totaling up the attendees here among our True/Slant contributor community. In fact, the vastly different numbers published on our website show how much the conservative and liberal sides of the aisle have in common: they both enjoy publishing unsourced claims based on rumor and innuendo.

Take our Rick Ungar for instance. Yesterday he wrote:

Unofficial attendance count for Beck’s 9-12 protest event – under 25,000.

Yes, so unofficial in fact that there’s no source to point back to on that claim.

And William Dupray, who writes for the blog Patriot Room and we’re happy to have recently had join us, wrote:

Crowd estimated 2 be 1.5 million by DC police.

I haven’t been able to find that 1.5 million number sourced to the DC police anywhere.

A lot of daylight between those two, wouldn’t you say? Almost two orders of magnitude! I guess it’s fair to say that the journey from Rathergate to Birthergate were really just two stops on the road of phony information being published as fact, and that we’ve got a long way to go in upping the discourse in our society.

Anyway, if you want an estimate that gets honestly closer to how many people were at the march, let’s turn to the conservative Washington Times newspaper:

In a patriotic, flag-waving “March on Washington” that conservative leaders said was a newly energized political movement determined to stop the Obama administration’s tax-and-spending programs, the protesters stretched for blocks up Pennsylvania Avenue to a massive rally on the West Lawn of the Capitol, chanting, “USA,” “Enough, Enough” and “We the people.”

Rally leaders estimated the crowd at about 75,000, but others said it was larger than that. Organizers had expected between 25,000 and 50,000.

The Times, I would argue given its readership and editorial staff, does not have an incentive to play down the size of the protest. It arrives at a number 3 times that pointed to by Rick, and a lot south of Bill’s. Sounds like they had a decent crowd in Washington yesterday, but nothing that a few French socialists couldn’t patch together in a few hours one morning to protest cuts to state aid for endless education later that afternoon.

In any event, reading the following remark from my friend Allahpundit over at Hot Air got me thinking:

I think using protest size as a gauge of popular sentiment is stupid — witness the huge turnouts against the war in early 2003 when public support was in the neighborhood of 65 percent — but it’s a fun talking point, so let’s have fun.

Allah is right – sizes of protests in Washington actually don’t mean anything. And if you guys think ‘having fun’ is going to stop Obamacare, you’ve forgotten what you learned during this endless summer of rage.

I think the tea party and town hall crowd should be proud of what they did in August – start a highly decentralized protest movement that popped up and kicked up a lot of sound and fury in A LOT of places. When Members of Congress worry about the tone of discussion when they meet with their constituents, they are more likely to change their vote.

When constituents come to Washington, Members of Congress pretty much ignore them.

Consider: official Washington, DC is pretty much closed down on the weekends. And in that sense, Washington becomes a gigantic free speech zone all weekend long, like those cages that the Bush administration introduced and were later used during the 2004 Democratic National Convention. You’re screaming really loud, on terms set by people who don’t want your message to be heard, and no one can actually hear you.

While living in DC, I attended a couple of those anti-war marches in 2003, not because I thought they’d make a lick of difference, but because friends would bus their way into town for them and the long marches were an opportunity to get caught up. On one of the marches, I remember we trailed past a spot on Pennsylvania Avenue where some Republican had set himself up on a balcony over us with a white board that read “Go Home Hippies.” It actually disrupted the march. People kept stopping to yell invective at him because instead of just chanting messages to no one in particular, they finally had someone to yell at whose views they were pretty sure they opposed.

He stood there in a warm coat, smoking a cigar, smirking.

It was a simulation of dissent against authority, and that so many people got distracted by it is pretty much all you need to know about why we ended up foolishly occupying Iraq.

So Glenn Beck fans, health care haters, tea baggers, tea partiers, Obama antagonists: stop worrying about how many of you were in Washington. Money, time, resources you spend in the nation’s capital on a weekend day when it’s shut down is money, times, resources you should spend stalking your purple district Congress member when she or he is actually back in your district to raise money and secure endorsements for re-election. If Obamacare is going to wither on the vine, the chill wind is going to come from dozens of Congressional districts, not the streets of an empty Washington, DC. I guarantee you that 500 protesters standing outside a Congress member’s district office weekend after weekend will mean a hell of a lot more to your effort than 500,000 protesters standing outside an empty Capitol.