The Report from Outside the President's Fundraiser

"A modified form of hunger strike for those whose political convictions are not quite so radical is giving up chives." -Woody Allen, Without Feathers

At about the same time that Tracy Chapman started singing “Talking ‘Bout A Revolution” for President Obama’s fundraising group inside the Westin St. Francis, I was standing outside the event in the dark (literally) with the single payer protesters to my left and the tea party protesters to the right. Several other groups, from Ron Paul libertarians to the satirical group "Billionaires for Wealth Care" to an apparent one-man cannabis awareness committee, filled the spaces in between.

The level of nervous energy from competing factions in the crowd was enough to convince you that change is inevitable. What, exactly, that change will be remains undetermined, but I hope that it is the change the President was elected to deliver, and not the change that the tea partiers seem to be threatening.

When I first arrived at 3:45 p.m., I learned that the right-wing tea partiers had been there for at least an hour. (I keep telling you, our side needs to get up earlier!) Interspersed among them were some African-American supporters of Obama who were stoically ignoring the occasional vitriol from the right for the chance of glimpsing this historic President.

Down at the corner, legendary Single Payer Now leader Don Bechler had convinced a number of stray passersby to help hold up several of the enormous 15-foot long signs he’d painted. White-jacketed single payer physicians stood at the edges of the signs, looking like the missing Elgin marbles suddenly reattached to the Parthenon. And there, in the midst of this, was the Lincolnesque Dr. James G. Kahn. I have to admit that I hadn’t considered that Dr. Kahn would himself show up. Seeing Kahn standing there like an ordinary protester on the street was akin to having an attending physician help you change an incontinent patient’s diapers; it was as unexpected as it was appreciated.

Meanwhile, the right was there with a colorful variety of paranoid signs. The strangest was a very large one that said “Obama is a Judas,” which struck me for its seemingly unconsidered potential to offend atheists and believers alike. Where did they come up with that? HOW did they come up with that? Compared to the Judas reference, the tea partiers’ derogatory images of Obama seemed tame.

The other tea party sign that compelled my attention was one that read: “China Owns Us.” I was tempted to pencil in, “Thanks to an obscene amount of treasury debt sold to China during the Bush administration,” but I’m almost certain that my efforts would have gone unappreciated.

On the corner, a hippie started playing a wooden flute and the right-wingers started another chant of “U.S.A! U.S.A.!” I recalled Norman Mailer’s Miami and the Siege of Chicago and wondered what would happen if the rest of us also started chanting “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” Would that throw them off their game? It was hard not to think of Harvey Korman as Hed-leyLamarr in “Blazing Saddles” signing up these right-wing miscreants for the raid on Rock Ridge.

Hedley Lamarr: "Qualifications?"

Hooded man: "Stampeding cattle."

Hedley: "That’s not much of a crime."

Hooded man: "Through the Vatican?"

Hedley: "Kinky! Sign here."

A solitary black man walked through the crowd wearing a knit hat with Obama's name stitched across it and holding an American flag with Obama's likeness on it. He was excoriated by two particularly vociferous anti-war protesters. I was impressed by his stoic, affable response to their anger. When I complimented his unflappability, he responded that he had marched as a child for civil rights with his mother, and that he understood that it would take time and support for the President to enact real change.

I spent the last hour discussing the strategies of a bunch of anti-war Ron Paul acolytes who had been unsuccessfully trying to peel off supporters from the tea party group. “We were approaching them, saying, ‘Guantanamo hasn’t been closed and the wars are still raging!’ but the tea partiers just think that’s great." He added incredulously, "We say: they're still torturing people. But they think torture is great. And when we try to explain HR 1207 to them, their eyes just glaze over. How do you talk to these people?”

Indeed.

I thank the anti-war protesters and Single Payer Now groups for showing up - because without them, the tea partiers would have been the largest group represented. As it was, they were merely the loudest. And this was the first time I noticed that the tea partiers were joined by a somewhat vocal group of Eastern European immigrants.