June 10, 2004
The Southern Strategy comes alive
Yesterday afternoon, I took a slight detour on the way to the Metro, walking for three blocks along Constitution Avenue to see how big the crowds for the Reagan procession were. Not as big as the crowd on Broadway when the Yankees won the World Series in 1996, but not bad considering the short notice and awful heat.
But one thing about the crowds stood out. If you take out the office workers walking on the street behind the waiting masses and the police officers watching the crowd, I counted only three non-white people in a three-block stretch that contained hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people.
For a state funeral that didn't carry any tinge of partisanship (aside from the weeklong media hagiographyfest) it was quite surprising the people who cared enough to come out to Constitution Avenue were such an unrepresentative group.
Ronald Reagan: divisive in life, divisive in death.
UPDATE: I guess there was a little diversity, if only by geographic accident; Suitland wasn't part of the official procession with the horses and the cassion.
Posted by rj3 at June 10, 2004 10:53 AM
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Comments
Maybe it was due to the fact that all the African-Americans who benefitted from the economic growth he helped create by lowering taxes caused most of them to be at work at the time.
Posted by: Chris at June 10, 2004 12:19 PM
Wouldn't that be true for all those white folks as well?
Posted by: Randolph at June 10, 2004 1:16 PM
My parents were upset for me for not adding to the paleness of the crowd, especially in light of my participation in the March for Women's Lives. "If you could stand to be outside for *that thing* downtown..."
Posted by: Amanda at June 11, 2004 5:18 PM