Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Wow Crowds in The Villages Frighten Dems
Sunday we headed south to The Villages to be part of the crowd welcoming Republican V.P. Nominee Sarah Palin. We left early because the crowds were anticipated to be in excess of 30,000. That estimate was based in part on the 30,000 event tickets that were snatched up by Florida residents who were anxious to see this charismatic candidate.
However, on Friday before the event, the Republican Party of Florida announced that all comers would be welcome; no one would be turned away. With that, the doors swung wide and the thousands who couldn’t get to a local party office to retrieve their free tickets stormed this small but growing retirement community 65 miles northwest of Orlando and 85 miles northeast of Tampa.
We arrived about 3 hours before the event was to begin and after waiting in traffic for an hour, only to learn that the parking for that area was closed, we turned around and headed back to another access. When we discovered we were in stopped traffic moving at a pace that would easily give a turtle first place, and finding ourselves 3.5 miles away we decided to reevaluate.
I needed to be back home to get some rest before getting up at 1:30 am for work and realizing, with the crowds and traffic, it would be hours after the event before we were able to get out of the heavy traffic and begin the drive back home. So we made the hard decision and turned around and left.
It was disappointing to miss being a part of this event, but duty called. When I learned the following day that the crowds were estimated to be 60,000, I wasn’t’ surprised. Though I had in no way got close enough to get a visual, and when we left it was still 2 hours before the event, the number of folks already there was amazing and there was no apparent end that we could see.
I’ve read a number on online accounts of the event but really not that many. It was heavily covered locally, but national coverage was limited. Newspapers close to The Villages reported the crowd at 60,000 estimated by the fire chief whose job it is to know such things.
There are anecdotal stories of people traveling in excess of 100 miles to be part of this event, the first by Mrs. Palin out from under the wing of Senator McCain. The crowd was hoping for a glimpse of this energetic and engaging newcomer to the US political scene. The media was hoping for a gaff.
A number of liberal papers and news sites disputed those numbers citing unnamed individuals in the crowd or pitting their reporters estimate of the crowd as low as 20,000 against the numbers cited by the professionals. They questioned the validity of the estimates and on Washington Post columnist suggested that the McCain campaign released the numbers provided by the Secret Service, which the columnist offered doesn’t provide numbers.
I think they are trying to diminish the welcome Florida gave to Palin because of the poor showing for Obama earlier in the week. The Miami Herald described Obama’s visit to Jacksonville, a metropolitan area of 1.3 million and heavily Democrat as attended by an “overflow crowd…capacity 13,000.
Oh, by the way, The Villages is a community of roughly 70,000 with the much larger metropolitan areas of Orlando and Tampa 1 ½ to 2 hours away. So it seems that even in something a benign as crowd estimates, the bias of the media shows through.
"We are all in the same boat on a stormy sea and
we owe each other a terrible loyalty." - G. K. Chesterson
Labels: Democrats, election, McCain, Obama, politics, Republicans, Sarah Palin
Friday, February 08, 2008
Medias campaign to disuade Republican voters
With Mitt Romney now out of the race, the media can now start their attack on the leading Republican presidential candidate. Up to this point they’ve nearly had a “love fest” with John McCain, essentially defending him against the concerns of conservatives.
For weeks the media has disparaged Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity as the "goon squad" for their, ah hem, lack of support for candidate McCain. Flying false flags and characterizing the concerns of conservative pundits more as personality issues and ignoring the real ideological and policy issues these commentators have postulated.
Now, after the Romney withdrawal, the national media suddenly begins its attack on McCain, the AP enumerating his failure to show up for “half” the Senate votes in the past year. All the while demonstrating that while Sens. Obama and Clinton’s failure to show records were less than stellar, they still recorded more Senate votes than McCain.
That is just the initial salvo. Reporting on McCains’s speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the San Francisco Chronicle’s Zachary Coile reported some of the specifics of conservatives disagreements with the front runner.
"It's not just that he voted against the tax cuts - he rallied moderate Republicans and Democrats to oppose the tax cuts"
“… his McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, which they called an affront to the First Amendment.”
“…McCain is too eager to compromise with Democrats.”
“…his vote against the 2001 tax cuts…”
“…his immigration bill, which failed in the Senate last year…”
“…the Gang of fourteen.”
Suddenly, these and other issues, that conservatives contend reveal McCain’s liberal mindset, are making headlines. This worry, along with McCain’s propensity to link arms with liberal Democrats like Russ Feingold and Ted Kennedy, and even more moderate Democrats such as Joe Lieberman, rankle conservatives who have watched McCain abandon them repeatedly over the years while championing liberal causes.
When the details of the pundits’ disagreement with McCain may have been educational to and had an effect on Republican primary voters, the media was silent. Now, with McCain the frontrunner and presumed nominee, these issues become headlines.
It seems to me this is the beginning of the liberal medias effort to discourage the Republican voter and dissuade them for casting a vote come November. I think their strategy is, if Republicans flee the voting booth, no matter who the Democrat nominee is, Hillary or Obama, they will have smooth sailing to the inauguration.
I have to say I was having problems thinking positively about our now presumed nominee any way. I didn’t support him in our Florida primary, and working up support now is going to be real tough.
James Dobson, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingram, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage all have come out against McCain. But they aren’t the only ones. Conservative voters across the nation have serious problems with John McCain. Those who don’t probably haven’t studied his record.
Granted there are varying degrees of conservativism, and even conservatives will disagree on various issues, but all will find in John McCain to have abandoned them in many of the issues they hold dear. I place myself firmly in their camp.
Labels: conservatives, election, McCain, politics