Many posts at
Booman's diary have listed obvious problems with the planned march on DC on September 24. Here are the main worries I see.
The organizers of the rally, ANSWER and UFPJ, should be commended for taking the initiative. Yet as organizations they seem to be distracted, fractious, and all too easily ridiculed by the media. The goals of the march are all over the map, and any speeches made by the organizers are likely to be uninspiring if not (I fear) somewhat hectoring.
If the national media cover the march at all, who's going to provide them with a focus, who's going to explain goals succinctly, who's going to tie together the many strands of incompetence, arrogance, and duplicity of Bush $ Cheney, where are the media going to get clips and money quotes?
Follow me below the fold for suggestions how we can help to organize an effective contribution to this march.
I really don't have much confidence in the organizers of the march being able to provide effective direction to the media. If coverage turns out to be chaotic I think a huge opportunity will be lost. I've been worried about this since the march was first announced, and suggested at the time that blogtopia should organize a march to be held before Sept. 24 so as to provide the media with a paradigm for the national mood of protest. But now it's too late for that, and we have to work with the date of the 24th.
There are two possibilities I see for making this work better as far as media coverage is concerned. One is to hold several rallies around the country simultaneously. We could work to organize these, line up speakers, with an eye toward maximizing local media coverage.
The other is for blogtopia to organize, on the side, to hold its own rally at DC on the 24th alongside, or just in the hours before, the main rally. This would be a part of the main rally, but also distinct and with its own dynamic that we provide.
Do people think we could find a place to meetup (as MSOC has been urging) in advance, and perhaps have several short speeches by some of the acknowledged bright lights of blogtopia? These speeches would be coordinated so as to complement one another and present a brief outline of the ways this administration has failed, the reasons it cannot be trusted to lead, and what we are looking for from politicians. Having taken our stand and said our say, we could then join the overall march and do whatever ANSWER and UFPJ are planning.
That would serve the media nicely, and if we did our thing early on then journalists would have plenty of tape immediately to fill out a full report. If they couldn't make any kind of sense out of the later proceedings, then they could fall back on our little side rally.
Ok, anybody think this is useful and feasible? I personally think that with coordination from dozens of blogs, we could put together a sizeable side rally, and certainly a well-informed one. I'm willing to do a significant amount of coordination for this, but of course I would need lots of help especially from people in and near DC.
