Comparative Crowd Analysis and the Left's 'Overwhelmingly White' Tea Party Smear

One of the characterizations I noticed with the reporting on yesterday's Sarah Palin rally was that the crowd was "overwhelmingly white" (at the O.C. Register). Kevin Drum of Mother Jones picked up on that. He lives in the O.C., but didn't know there was a GOP rally. Hence, he wasn't even there. But as a radical leftist of "white" ethnic background, he jumped at the chance to sling around the distorted "overwhelmingly white" concept as a smear against the tea parties. White guilt much? Plus, left-wing extremist Blue Texan at Firedoglake once again attempts a "racist" slur against the tea parties, alleging that the grassroots citizen protesters are the same as Timothy McVeigh and the stereotypical "Angry White Men":

Polls have shown that Teabaggers are lilly white and well off. They’re not the people getting kicked out of their houses by the banksters. They’re not unemployed. They’re not bearing the brunt of the Great Recession. They’re just doing what they do when Democrats are in charge. Obama’s death panels and FEMA camps have replaced Clinton’s black helicopters.

And of course, the fact that this president’s middle name is Hussein and he’s Muslim and black, well, that’s just a few extra scoops of nuts on the wingnut sundae.

Interesting.

The Washington Post just reported the other day on the virtually non-existent expressions of racism at the tea parties, but leftists ignore the facts, since they have nothing but hypocrisy and lies.

And on a more personal level is the evidence from my own reporting this weekend. I attended two major party rallies, and I posted two reports: "President Bill Clinton in the O.C. — Stumps for Loretta Sanchez, Blames George W. Bush for Economic Crisis," and "Sarah Palin Rallies GOP at 'Victory 2010' in Anaheim."

And we therefore have two roughly identical crowd photographs we can use for comparative purposes:

The picture at top shows the crowd in attendance at the start of the Democrat Party rally for Rep. Loretta Sanchez. Former President Bill Clinton was the marquee speaker. It's safe to say that this is about as close as one comes to a "mainstream" Democrat Party rally. And look at the crowd: White people are over-represented if we adopt the left's "overwhelmingly white" tea party slur. Or put another way, not enough DeShawns and Joses kicking it for Clinton. Oh sure, as I walked up at 3:00pm both blacks and Latinos were there in significant numbers, so stereotypically we could say this was indeed a Democrat demographic. But picture this same group of people above at a tea party in Missouri or Texas, etc., wearing more red-and-blue apparel and sporting some anti-Obama signs, and we'd be hearing cries of RAAAAACISM!! faster than you can say John Lewis, André Carson, and Emanuel Cleaver.

And checking the bottom photo from the Palin rally above, is that an "overwhelmingly white" crowd? Perhaps. But not so much more "white" than those gathered to hear Bill Clinton speak. And not shown at the GOP rally are the Latino couples standing next to me (out of the picture), or the Vietnamese-American activists supporting Van Tran. Here's another shot as well, taken a little earlier, showing some more folks of diverse backgrounds.

And what would be the response from a leftist to this argument? Well, they'd count the black and brown faces and decry the RAAAAACISM!!. Of course, only the GOP rally would be RAAAAACIST!! Meanwhile, there are 14 black conservative congressional candidates running for election around the country, but they're all Republicans so the MFM is conveniently ignoring them amid its constant whining about the party being "overwhelmingly white."

Everybody knows that RAAAAACISM!! is all the Dems have left. But that card's all played out. People just need to look around. We're all Americans. We have different philosophies on the role of government in society. One key difference among Republicans is they seek a color-blind America, not one divided along lines of racial tribalism. Or as Chief Justice John Roberts has argued: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."