General Feed
Months ago, NTU sat down with FreedomWorks, Tea Party Patriots, and other organizations to discuss the possibility of doing a march on Washington. The march was the brainchild of FreedomWorks' Brendan Steinhauser, who worked tirelessly for months to make it happen. NTU was a lead sponsor and pitched in with organizing, promoting, and facilitating hundreds of meetings between constituents and their Members of Congress.
It's funny to think back on those early planning meetings now, because we had all sorts of concerns that it might be tough to get a big turnout. At that point, it was distinctly possible that both the health care and cap-and-trade bills would have already been signed into law. Needless to say, that would blunt the momentum of a march like this pretty significantly.
Well, today that once-kooky idea became a reality. As somebody who was involved in the planning of the event, I can say that I was absolutely, positively blown away by the turnout of the event. At this early date, nobody knows for sure how many were there, but it's safe to say that it was well in the hundreds of thousands and might be into seven digits.
I arrived at Freedom Plaza, the starting point of the march, just before 7am. Folks were already gathering, even before the stage had been set up. The crowd quickly swelled to the point where the plaza appeared completely full to me. We had planned to start the program of speakers at 9am, but it was clear that we'd have to start early in order to accommodate an early launch time for the march. Otherwise, we'd overflow from Freedom Plaza and create all sorts of problems for ourselves with police authorities and permits.
We kicked off the speeches at about 8:15. NTU President Duane Parde was the first speaker of the day, and rallied the already-huge crowd to say "NO MORE" to bailouts, czars, debt, and the many other cancers our government faces today. By the time 9:30 rolled around, we were packed like sardines in Freedom Plaza and people appeared to be spilling over onto intersections and nearby streets. The crowd was so large that there were sections of people cheering to something said nearby to them, rather than the speaker on stage. Even the police officer in charge of everything was marveling at the size and energy of the crowd.
If memory serves, we got the word from police that we needed to move out around 10am. After wrapping up, we started directing everyone to march down Pennsylvania. Within 20 minutes, Pennsylvania was packed from sidewalk to sidewalk with marchers. What amazed me is that the crowds never seemed to stop coming! It makes sense, though, when you think that we weren't originally scheduled to begin marching until 11:30am.
I stayed in Freedom Plaza to direct crowds, and we started to get reports from the Capitol area that people were unable to access the Capitol lawn because of the huge numbers. It suddenly dawned on me that I was supposed to speak in about an hour, so I figured I'd better hoof it to the Capitol to make sure I could make it to the front.
I half speed-walked, half ran, doing my best to cut through what was basically wall-to-wall marchers on Pennsylvania Avenue. (For what it's worth, it was on the sidewalks of Pennsylvania Avenue that I saw most of the offensive signs). After arriving at the Capitol, I managed to snake my way to a police barricade (where I had to prove to a half-dozen people that I was actually a speaker) before making it to the stage area.
The view from the stage area was nothing short of breathtaking. There was a sea of people, surrounding the stage on all sides. From the podium, a speaker was surrounded 270 degrees by huge crowds. Not only was the west lawn filled, with people fully surrounding the reflecting pool and continuing to 3rd Street, but the sides of the stage were packed with people as well.
One thing to note, the reason why the rallyers don't fill up the Mall in the pictures is because we weren't allowed to. Our permit only allowed for us to fill up to 3rd Street, and there was another permitted event starting at 3rd on the Mall, so police were actively removing any of our people from that area. Instead, they were forced to surround the mall or spill up Pennsylvania and Maryland Avenues.
All of the speakers were similarly dumbstruck by the size of the crowd. The energy and enthusiasm was truly amazing. While waiting for my turn to speak, I witnessed one of the most amazing sights of my life: hundreds of thousands of Americans pledging allegiance to the flag waving high above the Capitol dome.
After speaking, I was luckily escorted up the barricaded Capitol steps by a Congressional staffer that I know as well as none other than Representative Bill Posey (R-FL) and his wife, who had come down to check things out. They walked us up the front steps, and he very graciously took a few photos of me with the crowd behind me. I don't think I'll ever see such a sight again.
As Brendan and I stood there at one point during the rally, he turned to me and said, while pointing to the enormous crowd, "This health care bill is dead." Let's hope that he's as right about that as he was about 9/12 being a success.