I didn’t wander down to the Capitol and National Mall on Saturday because I’m nursing a bum ankle from a spill I took playing pickup hoops. But I wish had been able to go, and I further wish I had developed even a crude survey instrument to administer to protesters. What I would have asked them is one, simple question, “Whom did you support in last year’s Republican primaries?”
My suspicion is there would be an unusually high number of people replying, "Ron Paul."
...
...strip away the angry rhetoric and easily-mocked signs to listen to what people are complaining about--and, perhaps more tellingly, what they are not complaining about--and the protesters sound eerily Paulesque. They are complaining about government intrusion: oppressive use of government (czars!), too much intervention in personal lives and markets (death panels!), long-term debt obligations (where will the money come from?!), and the proper role of the federal government (it's all so unconstitutional!)--that is, they fret that Obama is going to destroy America and American values from within. What the vast majority do not seem to be complaining about, so far as I can tell, is how the Administration is fighting and managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or its overall security and intelligence posture--that is, they don't seem too worried that Obama is going to let America be destroyed from the outside.
Granted, a plausible explanation for a general absence of defense or foreign policy critiques is that the national conversation right now is focused squarely on health care coverage, deficits and debt, and domestic policy more generally. It may well be that if I poked a Saturday protester in DC he or she would have had something critical to say about Obama’s foreign and defense policies, too. Still, it's interesting to consider the possibility that the town halls of Summer 2009 are a rekindled version of Ron Paul rallies in 2007 and 2008. And one of the reasons I suspect this is the nature of the fervor itself--its tenor, its intensity, its certainty, and especially its language.
Actually, I disagree with Nate on one part. A lot of these people do think the President is out to hand over the country to the Terrorists.
