Ignoring Dissent
Posted on September 2, 2008 at 7:58 amJackson Baker reports on how Tennessee Republicans deal with protesters in Minneapolis:
“Ignore them,” she said, advising the faithful not even to look at the literature left around the hotel by the vets’ group. One GOP insider privy to some maneuvering that had gone on behind the scenes passed the word that Action Had Been Taken. “You notice that most of them [the vets] aren’t here any longer,” he said, smiling in serious and secret satisfaction. “You got the hotel to turn them out?” he was asked. The only response was a deepening of the smile.
Although stragglers to the breakfast meeting had missed it, Smith claimed also to have run off would-be attendees from the Daily Kos blog, that online lynchpin of left-of-center sentiment.
The sense of being under siege was accentuated later when, as a chartered bus transported members of the Tennessee and Alaska delegations to the Xcel Center, a uniformed St. Paul policeman named Mike informed riders that there was potential trouble in the streets and that, if it developed, he would, in effect, take over command of the vehicle.
Mike’s wife, also a St. Paul police officer, had been called up on her day off for special duty on those selfsame streets, and she had passed on some alarming intelligence about demonstrators who might be encountered on the way to the arena. “They’ve got weapons and…” pause “…bags of feces,” Mike announced.
That sobering news took a few seconds sinking in.
“Damn Democrats!” someone said finally.
“Tell me about it!” Mike said.
