Suppose They Gave a Rally and Nobody Cared?

The coverage of yesterday's One Nation Working Together rally was rather cynical, and this isn't counting the obviously vicious coverage from conservative news outlets. Connie Hair of Human Events mocked the organizers' claims of how many people were there. But get this: more legitimate, staid news sources such as the New York Times expressed skepticism of the rally's effectiveness, insisting that it brought fewer people to the National Mall in Washington than Glenn Beck's rally in August. And some editorials wondered aloud if this would really help the Democrats get their act together in time for the November elections. My mother suggested that they should have brought in some celebrity speakers to draw crowds, but given how President Obama has fallen short of expectations of some of his most famous backers, maybe it makes sense that one of the bigger names at the rally was Native American comedian Charlie Hill, whom I just heard of yesterday.

The problem, of course, is that this rally expressed and voiced the concerns of the unemployed, the indigent, and the poor - just the sort of people, my mother pointed out, who cannot travel to the nation's capital to attend a rally. Fortunately - alas, really - the nation's capital itself has plenty of people in those categories, so I'm sure many of them must have attended. But the unemployed autoworkers in Detroit and the Louisiana shrimpers affected by BP's greed were less able to speak out for their livelihoods. So it was no surprise that local events were staged across the country. MoveOn.org staged several parties across the nation to get people to call voters to support and volunteer for state and local candidates.

I attended one such party, of course, scared by Richard Blumenthal's narrow lead in the Connecticut U.S. Senate race into participating. As fate would have it, this particular event was given the task of drumming up support for North Carolina Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, who's running for the Senate against incumbent Republican Richard Burr. This is the same race I lambasted Chuck Todd over when he opined that it was a race Burr was guaranteed to win before Marshall was even nominated, and she was competitive for awhile, but even the most optimistic liberal would have to concede that Burr is so comfortably ahead that campaigning for Marshall must seem like a fool's errand by now. Fine. Burr hasn't won yet, and I was happy and proud to play a part, no matter how small, to stop him.

Even if Chuck Todd - or anyone else - doesn't care. :-O