‘Whoa! Wait your turn. You’ll get arrested.’
Protests are bigger than those in Cleveland. So far, the activists are orderly.
On the streets outside the Democratic National Convention, the stories are just as engaging as the ones inside. They might even be better.
Day 1, 6:23 a.m.
You might be seeing pictures of people in handcuffs soon.
The Democratic National Convention is going to hit some in-flight turbulence in Philadelphia. I can already tell. This morning, I’m staring at a full calendar of protests that includes training sessions for civil disobedience.
One popular grass-roots organizing website, Democracy Spring, is asking visitors to sign up if they’re willing to get arrested with “hundreds” of others this week to protest “to end the corruption of big money in politics and ensure free and fair elections.”
Last week’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland was, depending on your perspective, either a police state or a model of control. You had a small bunch of communists and Christian fundamentalists running around the city
yelling at each other while thousands of police officers played moderator, sort of like a heavily militarized debate camp.
It’s worth reflecting for a moment on why Cleveland didn’t yield the election riots that the press corps had feared for months. It’s not like those fears came out of nowhere. I covered a couple of Donald Trump rallies in Southern California that ended with crowds of protesters and police in the streets, with Latino teenagers brandishing Mexican flags and telling me they were afraid of a “civil war” if Trump got elected. Plus, lefty activists often protest the Republican conventions.
The activists and protesters simply didn’t show up in Cleveland. Not in numbers, anyway.
But they’re here in Philadelphia, which is easier to get to from the big Eastern cities, has more places to stay and, probably most important, has Bernie Sanders. Sunday’s leftleaning demonstrations — attended by thousands of people across the city, I’d guess — were already larger than anything that happened in Cleveland.
As if to underscore the point, two of the first protesters I met Sunday outside City Hall were from Youngstown, Ohio, about an hour’s drive outside Cleveland. They had come to protest the Democrats, but they had not driven down the road to Cleveland to protest Trump. Fear was a big factor, they said.
“To be honest, everything that I’ve seen at Donald Trump rallies, it’s just a giant hate fest,” said Ashley Vaughan, 24, who supports Green Party candidate Jill Stein. “I’d rather stay away from stuff like that.”
“Cleveland was looking a little scary. They had fences up everywhere,” said Brandon Gorcheff, 23, who commutes to that city for work. “At least I don’t see people here walking around with guns.”
5:53 p.m.
One by one, like passengers escaping a disabled airplane, a protester would step out of the crowd, carefully hop over the metal barricade and then politely and immediately get detained by the waiting police. Meanwhile, the crowd chanted, “Election fraud, election fraud!”
At one point a whole crowd of protesters tried at the same time to hop over the waist-high metal barricades outside the Wells Fargo Center, where the DNC is being held. But even that became orderly after a few seconds of frenzy.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” the cops said to one guy trying to hop the fence quickly. The protester stopped. “Wait your turn,” a smiling officer said. “You’ll get arrested.” He did, and he was — at least for a while.
Bernie Sanders supporters tried to enter the secure perimeter around the DNC tonight, and police told me there have been 55 civil citations issued for disorderly conduct.
Protesters wore yellow or blue ribbons — yellow for the marshals managing the crowd, light blue for the “tactical” team.
“Can we talk like this?” Desiree Kane, 34, of Denver asked me as we walked backward, side by side. She had a yellow ribbon, and so she was holding her arms out wide, like a rock singer about to fall backward into a crowd of her fans. She was trying to keep people from blocking the view of the enormous “DEMOCRACY SPRING” banner at the front of the crowd.
I asked her why she was marching.
“We want the billionaires out of politics,” Kane said. I typed as I walked, and my phone auto-corrected “politics” to “platoons.”
“At some point, asking over and over again — it goes nowhere,” Kane said. So “we’re going to rush up on the steps of the DNC and crash the party.”