Crashing the Hillary Clinton Rally, I Mean, DNC Protests
When a friend emailed to invite me to cover this past weekend's DNC protests, I had blogger visions running through my head of life-size puppets, patchouli and lots and lots of yelling. Sadly, it seems like most of the good stuff happened inside the hotel, where the protesters weren't supposed to be and I didn't try to go. But I've got your boring, ill-attended protest round-up anyway, complete with pictures of as much of the crazy as I bothered trying to document.
I'll admit that I slept in on Saturday morning, seeing no need to try to beat either the Rules Committee members or the protesters to the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel. If the number of random news outlets running around trying to find a protester to interview at 11 a.m. is anything to go by, I wasn't the only one. It turns out that most of the protesters went to the park behind the Omni Shoreham, leaving the entrance of the Marriott guarded by a few hold outs and a bunch of press until lunchtime.
Stopping into the McDonald's on Connecticut Ave. for some fries and a much-needed Diet Coke, I found about 20 protesters holed up in there, scarfing lunch before heading back to the Marriott. Two suburban women discussed how Obama was a typical Chicago politician who "had never been poor," while a Florida protester asked everyone in line (with no sense of irony) to budge in front of them because he was so busy. He got steamed at me when I told him no, but my stand seemed to empower the others and he was forced to concede defeat and wait his turn.
Standing by the Metro station with my soda, I listened to a homeless man heckle the protesters on their way up the hill, and eventually joined the throng. It was far from crowded, with a bunch of other picture-taking gawkers filling out the crowd. Almost all of them were either wearing or carrying Hillary Clinton gear. While they dutifully performed their call-and-response ("50 states, not 48!"), the thing that really got them excited was the Hillary-mobile, which would've earned a standing ovation if everyone hadn't already been standing.
All in all, there weren't but a couple of hundred, mostly older protesters there when I left, shouting and waving for the press, the cops and the taxi drivers while the Committee members stayed safely underground. On the scale of protests worth watching, this rated less interesting than a good World Bank protest and more interesting than a taxi driver protest. But check out the pictures yourself!