Nathan Newman wrote:
>A few on
>February 15th in New York attempted this, but they were such the exception,
>and so unreinforced by broader public outreach to that unconverted group,
>that I'm hardly surprised that it was ineffective.
-Who heard the damn speeches on February 15? People were there because -they were hoping to stop the war - all kinds of people, from -anarcho-kids to church ladies. You're obsessing about this for some -reason that I don't quite understand, unless it's that you have a -crush on David Corn.
It's kind of amazing the assumption that speeches at rallies should be forgettable. From union rallies to civil rights rallies, some of the most memorable rhetoric in history, that the media picked up and played over and over again, came from speeches at podiums at such rallies.
The idea that such speeches should be forgettable is all part of why I don't take the left's complaints about media very seriously. Even when, as happened, C-SPAN broadcast their speeches for hours at a time nationally, they don't take their message seriously enough to make it appealing to that audience.
Of course people who attended the rally were there to stop the war. The hope that by being there, the sheer numbers would make the public pay attention. But those numbers would be far more effective if they drew attention to substantive speeches and clarifying metaphors at the podium that would match those numbers to moral authority. The "I have a Dream Speech" is so sanctified in memory as to lose meaning in the present day, but at the time it was a speech that transformed the sheer numbers in Washington into a moral battering ram that helped change national politics.
As I said, I'm pretty skeptical of rallies as a tool for social change, since more direct outreach is often by definition more direct and bypasses the media filter. But if we are going to go to the work of assembling vast numbers of people, why not use it to focus attention on engaging and media-genic speeches that might otherwise not get attention?
-- Nathan Newman