House call draws big crowd on short notice

Photo copyright Alonzo Hosford; by permission

When Rep. Michele Bachmann called for an "emergency House call," even she did not anticipate how many people would respond on less than one week's notice.

Final estimates of the total crowd size vary from at least 15,000 (from Alonzo Hosford, member of the Morristown Tea Party Organization and author of the NJCommonSense blog, who was on the ground and took these photographs) to 25,000 (from Steve Lonegan, as quoted by Hosford) The Capitol Police, according to Mr. Hosford, actually estimated anywhere from 50,000 to 70,000, but Mr. Hosford is inclined to reject that estimate as unrealistic.

More important than the crowd size, says Hosford, were these additional statistics that he provided: that most protesters traveled from 4 to 12 hours each way (with some traveling for as long as 20 hours), and that protesters waited in line for as long as two hours to enter the House office buildings, including, most notably, the Cannon Building, where both Rep. Bachmann and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have their offices. (As Speaker, Ms. Pelosi also maintains an office in the Capitol.)

Mr. Hosford was highly critical of the coverage from Fox News:

To my surprise on leaving the building the line had dwindled to a few hundred and then Fox news reporter Griff Jenkins finally discovered the big news item happening outside of House office buildings. Griff Jenkins had gotten popular with the first few Tea Party express bus stops reported for Greta Van Susteren. However in my opinion he went down hill after those missing the points and the individual stories of the people for the rest of the tour. However people still love him. Fox needs to embed reporters into the folks who get up at 3 am to get to DC or travel the previous day to find the good stories  or hire me to do it with a good camera crew rather than my dinky Panasonic that is seeing more that the main media big ones.

Presumably Mr. Hosford is talking about how early he himself got up to catch his bus, which departed from Ridgewood, New Jersey, at 6:00 a.m.

The day did not proceed entirely without incident. Several hours prior to the House call rally, several ultra-liberal protesters were arrested after refusing to leave the Hart Building office of Senator Joseph Lieberman, who has announced his intention to vote against cloture in the Senate as it considers health-care reform. And during the rally, twelve protesters were arrested in and outside Speaker Pelosi's Cannon Building office for either refusing to leave when ordered, or "disorderly conduct" (shredding copies of the Pelosi bill out in the hallway).

Despite the rally, Mr. Hosford notes that the Democratic House leadership are determined to pass the bill anyway, and describes their attitude as something akin to a "suicide pact."