LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Doug from Reno was standing about 50 yards
from the stage at Saturday’s “Showdown in Searchlight,” two hours
before the official noon start of the rally featuring Sarah
Palin. He was part of a huge crowd already gathering for the big
first-day event of the Tea Party Express tour, and U.S. Highway
95 was backed up for more than a mile in either direction as
thousands more made their way into the dusty lot a couple miles
north of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s hometown.
He was wearing a National Rifle Association cap and
mirrored sunglasses, and had a sticker on his shirt promoting a
conservative website, DumpReid.com. Doug held aloft
a large hand-lettered sign: “Karl Marx and Mao Were Not Founding
Fathers!”
So far as most major media organizations are concerned, he
was just another dangerous right-wing crackpot, but most major
media organizations never actually talked to Doug or others like
him among the thousands of grassroots activists who showed up in
Searchlight. With few exceptions, what brought reporters to
Saturday’s rally was the opportunity to do what they have been
doing in their Tea Party coverage for more than a year: Highlight
negative “gotcha” moments to discredit the movement as a
dangerous collection of hate-filled, misinformed lunatics,
meanwhile asking attendees questions along the lines of, “Who do
you consider to be the leader of your movement?”
In that sense, Saturday was a two-for-one press-corps
special, providing the media a chance to play “gotcha” with
Palin, the GOP’s 2008 vice-presidential candidate who is widely
presumed by reporters to be a Tea Party leader, if not in fact
the leader. Palin did not disappoint either fans or
detractors at Searchlight, using her speech to assail the media
for promoting Democratic claims that the movement is… well, a
dangerous collection of hate-filled, misinformed lunatics.
“We’re not inciting violence,” Palin proclaimed from the
windswept stage that organizers had erected on the back of a
flatbed truck. “Don’t get sucked into the lame-stream media
lies.”
Palin’s denial of the accusation, wrapped in an anti-media
message, drew cheers from the enthusiastic crowd and was quickly
headlined by the same “lame-stream” reporters whom she targeted.
The national press corps seems to be pursuing the idea that Palin
can be used to discredit the Tea Party movement and vice-versa,
as part of a mutually-reinforcing negative propaganda campaign
intended to convince America that the only people who oppose the
Democratic Party and its policy agenda are (you guessed it) a
dangerous collection of hate-filled, misinformed lunatics. So any
event that connected Palin to the Tea Party was sure to draw a
swarm of reporters, only too happy to depict both the crowd and
the featured speaker as irresponsible dingbats.
The good news for conservatives is that the “angry mob” —
to borrow a phrase made famous by the Democratic National
Committee’s spokesman last August — now includes a majority of
the U.S. electorate. The same polls that show Americans’
continuing to reject the health-care plan that Nancy Pelosi
rammed through Congress also show that the Tea Party movement has
higher favorability ratings than either major political
party.
Whatever those polls say about Palin, she is drastically
more popular than Pelosi. At least the Democratic Speaker of the
House has the consolation that she’ll probably get re-elected by
her California constituents in November, whereas Harry Reid now
appears utterly doomed to defeat. Polls show that, if the
election were held tomorrow, Reid would lose to any likely
challenger among the dozen or so Republican Senate candidates who
are contending in the June primary — all of whom were making the
rounds shaking hands at Saturday’s rally.
Who will be the next Senator from Nevada? There’s been no
opportunity to interview Vegas oddsmakers since I arrived here
Thursday, but “Not Harry Reid” is certainly the odds-on favorite
in that race.
The idea that Reid, the Democratic Party and their policy
agenda are overwhelming unpopular in Senate leader’s home state
is considered proof to the press corps that the citizens of
Nevada are a dangerous collection of hate-filled, misinformed
lunatics — like David Moredock and his wife Nancy, who showed up
at the Searchlight rally to hear Palin speak and therefore are,
according to press-corps logic, presumed to be illiterate
nutjobs.
In fact, Moredock is a Las Vegas pharmacist who says his
decades of experience have convinced him that the new law signed
last week by President Obama “is not the way to fix” the
health-care system.
“Mandating and imposing is not fixing health care,”
Moredock told me Saturday morning when I stopped to talk to him
after taking photos of the anti-Reid signs he and his wife were
holding. “We want health-care done right, but this is not the
right way.”
OK, so what about Doug from Reno, the guy with the sign and
the NRA hat? Does he fit the media stereotype of a Tea Party
activist? It should be pointed out that the slogan on Doug’s sign
was a statement of historical fact — neither Karl Marx nor Mao
Zedong were among the Founding Father — and it is also a
historical fact that some of Obama’s associates have praised Marx
and Mao. Anyone in what Palin called the “lame-stream media” who
dismissed Doug as just another kook could have learned a lot just
by talking to him.
Doug Rodrigues is “part Chinese, part Hawaiian and
Portuguese,” he explained. “In 1951, my Chinese grandfather
returned to Macau, where he had some land across the river in
Canton. That’s when Mao and the communists were taking over. He
crossed the bridge into Canton and he was immediately arrested
and thrown into prison, along with the other political prisoners.
Most of them were either executed or died in prison. That’s the
last we heard of him.”
Doug’s concerns about socialism — “which is where I
believe the country is heading, with the present administration,”
he says — may seem far-fetched and indeed, it is rather unlikely
that anything like Mao’s revolution could come to America. Why?
Primarily because there are so many Americans like Doug, people
who believe in freedom. They are proud to be part of that
dangerous collection of hate-filled, misinformed lunatics
otherwise known as “We the People.”
