Fox News personality Glenn Beck was surely one of the most “public” faces during the huge “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington over the weekend, and it’s obvious that he is popular with many of the hundreds of thousands of Americans ABC News estimated packed the National Mall for the rally.
But it would be a mistake to dismiss the massive assembly – as some liberals might wish to do – as primarily just a gathering of fans of Glenn Beck’s TV show. And it certainly would be wrong to dismiss the gathering’s patriotic participants as people with “extreme” views on various public issues.
Rally participants had serious, and very legitimate, concerns about the direction of our country. Most of them were not showing up to get autographs or pictures. Instead, many traveled long distances to sound the alarm that our country is on the wrong path.
High on the list of concerns of those who attended the peaceful rally are ObamaCare socialized medicine, the counterproductive $862 billion “stimulus” plan, and the taxpayer-funded bailouts of private companies that had behaved irresponsibly.
Are those critics’ views “extreme”? Hardly. In a Rasmussen Reports survey released Monday, almost 60 percent of U.S. voters surveyed said ObamaCare should be repealed. Only 36 percent opposed repeal.
In fact, Rasmussen notes, “A majority has favored repeal of the legislation in every single week since it became law.” And a majority of likely voters told Rasmussen that ObamaCare will raise health care costs, while only 18 percent said costs will drop and 21 percent said they will remain the same.
If opponents of the big rally in Washington want to say it was “extreme,” then they also must consider most Americans “extreme.”