Rick Santorum had what most likely was the worst day ever in Tacoma, Washington yesterday. He chose to deliver a speech at night — just hours after Governor Gregoire signed a same-sex marriage bill into law — and stood high above the crowd, with lighting coming from below — making it look like (dare I say it?) a national totalitarian movement address, and all this just 500 feet away from an Occupy Movement protest camp.
Santorum was not just glitter bombed, but, as Paul Constant at the Slog writes, (in possibly the most-amazing write-up ever), “Rick Santorum was glitter bukkake’d.”
Who could blame them? In this video of the event, you can hear Santorum parroting the National Organization For Marriage Prop 8 decision talking points, including the typical, “That’s what the 9th circuit said when they handed down the decision striking down Proposition 8. What they said was that anybody who disagreed with them were irrational and the only reason they could possibly agree is they were a hater or a bigot.”
Santorum was shouted down and mic-checked many times, and lost it at least once on the Occupy protestors, saying, “Instead of standing here unemployed, yelling at somebody, go out and get a job!”
Constant describes the nightmare:
Members of Occupy Tacoma embedded in the crowd mic checked Santorum on several different occasions. (Occupy Tacoma headquarters were just 500 feet away from the rally site.) Marriage equality activists started a pro-gay-marriage chant that silenced the candidate for something like two minutes, and they encouraged passing traffic to honk in support of marriage equality and taxing the wealthy, adding to the general cacophony. The concrete plaza in front of the Washington State History Museum entrance, with its sweeping coliseum-style seating surrounded on two sides by abrupt, tall brick walls, was a perfect echo chamber, muddling both Santorum’s speech and the shouts of protesters into one dull, angry roar. (It didn’t help, either, that Santorum was lit from below, to eerie effect, during the speech, or that the podium in which he was speaking was directly above a pair of doors marked, creepily, EDUCATION CENTER.)
And if you ever had any doubts as to who would actually attend a Santorum rally to support him:
A man carrying a sign that read “Go Rick/PRO-LIFE/PRO-NORMAL-MARRIAGE” ranted at a supporter of marriage equality who asked him what a “normal” marriage was. Gay marriage, the man explained, “is sick. It’s against nature. Nature itself says it’s wrong, not to mention the Bible.” Santorum’s decision to rally in Washington today was pure retail politics, and it was a shrewd political move; conservatives are mad as hell about today’s marriage equality bill being signed into law. People at the rally couldn’t stop talking about the gays and how much they didn’t want them to marry.
We’re working on the Tasering Santorum protestor next — stay tuned.