Sunday, October 31, 2010

The Rally for Yuppies

I watched the last two hours of the Rally for Sanity/Fear. (Apparently, I didn't miss much the first hour...) I didn't mean to; I was just going to watch five or ten minutes, but it was moderately amusing so I kept watching. More or less an extended Daily Show or Colbert Report, with guest stars, and awkward live bits.

The crowd seemed mild and yuppie-ish.

Also looked really large to me, but I haven't heard any estimates. Fox estimated 7 people, and Stewart, like ten million.

I kept expecting Bruce Springsteen. And for them to say the word, "Vote."

Funny thing is, the rally is almost critique proof; especially by the media. Indeed, most of the criticisms I've read seem kind of churlish.

Really, it was so mild and bland. Eh.

4 comments:

Duncan McGeary said...

Thinking is over. There was never that "I can't believe they did that!" moment I've come to expect from Stewart.

They had to be PG, obviously. But it lost the edge.

H. Bruce Miller said...

CBS hired the same outfit that estimated the crowd for the Glenn Beck event to estimate the crowd for this event. Results: Crazies 87,000, Sane People 215,000.

I'm sure the teabaggers will find some way to discredit this or explain it away.

Duncan McGeary said...

The Guardian, which I would presume was somewhat neutral says this:

"The crowd was enormous – easily a quarter of a million people.

But they follow up by saying:

The..."Restoring Honour" rally, which occupied the same space several months ago"..."attracted between 250,000 and 500,000 people..."

So -- pretty comparable....

Makes me wish the Parks service would do estimates again; even if inaccurate, one would assume they would apply the same basic metrics to different events.

H. Bruce Miller said...

Odd that the CBS outfit and The Guardian are pretty much in agreement on the crowd estimate for the Sanity rally and yet miles apart on the estimate for the Insanity rally. How could that be? How does The Guardian make its estimates?