DeMint Blames Lack of Tea Party Crowd Diversity on Timing, Media
The turnout to today’s Tea Party was indisputably high — likely in the tens of thousands (though organizers claimed it reached 1.5 million). But racially diverse it was not. And according to Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), that’s the fault of the event’s timing and the media coverage.
“If anyone does a fair analysis of the crowd, it’s a cross-section of the population,” he said in a phone interview.
I agreed that it was a geographically and economically diverse crowd, but I noted that the protesters were at least 99 percent white — in fact, in my four-plus hours at the event, I’d only seen three African-American demonstrators.
DeMint had a simple explanation. “It’s probably just the time and organization and the media that promoted it,” he said.
Well, that explains that.
*Update: *Thanks to our readers for bringing more realistic crowd size estimates to my attention.
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