It was a beautiful morning in Boston and I had no appointments, so I decided to venture down to Boston Common to see first-hand what all this Tea Party fuss is about. I had visions of doing some Daily-Show-esque interviews … putting some of these folks on the spot to see how well they could defend their positions. So I hung a badge around my neck that said “PRESS” and I wandered through the crowd with my camera and microphone looking for people to interview. Here’s what I learned.

• Interviewing is hard. Whether you’re a journalist, documentarian, or plain old rabble rouser, it takes some chutzpah to walk up to strangers who are essentially minding their own business and start asking them questions. It’s a little easier to approach people holding signs or wearing costumes because they’re essentially advertising that they want to be heard. To the extent that these are the people getting quoted in the media, we may be getting an exaggerated or otherwise distorted view of the general sentiment among the crowd.
• Interviewing with a hidden agenda is even harder. These people have done you the favor of consenting to an interview, not to an argument or debate. I tried a few times to gently lead people into contradicting themselves, but I didn’t want to be nasty about it. You can hear for yourself (scroll down).
• Interviewing while running your own sound and video on equipment you’re still learning to use … fuggedaboudit. I ended up with interview subjects out of frame, audio levels too high and too low, once I actually forgot to hit record … it was a mess. So we have stills here instead of video. Sorry.
• If today’s crowd was a representative sample, Tea Party supporters are overwhelmingly middle class, middle aged, and white. I tried really hard to find minorities in the crowd. With one or maybe two exceptions, they all turned out to be press, tourists, or anti-Tea-Party protesters.
• Ask a bunch of Tea Party supporters about their beliefs and you will hear the same lines over and over again. Taxes are too high, government is too big, leaders in Washington are ignoring the Constitution, we’re losing our freedoms, we need to remember what this country is about, and so on. It is rare to hear any talk of specific changes that should be made other than undoing whatever the Obama administration has done (and a good bit of what the Bush administration did, too). This made the interviews challenging, because you can only ask the same follow-up question so many times without being a jerk.
• Tea Party supporters may have very simple views of the world, but they don’t seem to be stupid or insane. Kooks seemed to be the exception, not the rule. But events like the Tea Party do attract some kooks. (See “new world order, below.)
• These Tea Party organizers have been doing this road show for months and they still can’t get a sound system right. Sarah Palin could barely be heard by anyone more than 50 yards away from the podium. (Other presenters came through much more clearly.)

Here are the people I spoke to today. Click the photos for MP3 audio of the interview. Pardon the big changes in volume. Again … still learning the equipment.

When I got home, I recorded a few other thoughts about today’s experience.

Sorry about the “beard.” It’s for a movie I’m filming this weekend. Can’t wait to shave.

[W]hat frustrates the American people is a Washington where every day is Election Day. We cannot wage a perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about their opponent — a belief that if you lose, I win. Neither party should delay or obstruct every single bill just because they can. The confirmation of well-qualified public servants should not be held hostage to the pet projects or grudges of a few individual Senators. Washington may think that saying anything about the other side, no matter how false, is just part of the game. But it is precisely such politics that has stopped either party from helping the American people. Worse yet, it is sowing further division among our citizens and further distrust in our government.

Does anyone disagree?

The “other version” of the Hitler-Coakley-Brown video has now received well over a million views. But not only on DrRonPaul2012’s page. The same video has been uploaded to YouTube by:

• Battlefield315 (67,000 views as of Friday afternoon)
• RonPaul4Pres2K8 (4,200)
• tikamue (1,500)
• tonytonytee (1,200)
• wbradss (400)

… and a whole bunch of others. There are probably additional me-too posts coming in every hour.

So now I’m wondering whether DrRonPaul2012 is really the author of the subtitles of “Hitler Finds Out Scott Brown Massachusetts Senate Seat” or if he was also merely a re-poster who happened to get found by the right people.

Can anyone shed some light the true origins of this clip? (Not the TRUE origins … we know it’s from the movie “Downfall.” I mean the true origins of the more popular Coakley-Brown version.) And if DrRonPaul2012 is not the real subtitle author, does the real subtitle author have any copyright claims against him? Or does the fact that we’ve all be stealing from “fairly using” the original movie void any sort of authorship rights for the new subtitles we’ve added?

Some three-and-a-half hours later, I posted my creation:

I put a link to the video in my Facebook status update and in a tweet with the #MASen hashtag, and went to bed.

This morning I was very happy to see that a handful of people had already watched it. Some of my Facebook friends shared it, and some of their friends watched it, too. It wasn’t too long before the video had over 100 views. I was pretty psyched. People were paying attention.

Then around 1:00 this afternoon I saw myself mentioned in a tweet. It said “@universalhub Local playwright Dave Schrag’s video @dvschrag is a better take: http://bit.ly/7iOtjH.” OK, I thought, that’s good news. One of my friends is spreading the word. But then I thought … Wait a minute. A “better take” than what?

I looked at @universalhub’s earlier tweets and found “Hitler is stunned by Coakley’s defeat. http://bit.ly/6pRqzt.” Someone else had come up with exactly the same idea. And this other video was getting picked up all over the place, including big-name sites like Comedy Central. It was no contest. By early evening, my video had been watched almost 350 times, a number that I would have been awfully pleased with twelve hours prior. But this other video – which is funny but, IMHO, not as funny as mine – had almost 75,000 views. Seventy-five-THOUSAND views in a day. It was the 55th most viewed video today on ALL OF YOUTUBE!

So I ask those of you who know this stuff better than I, what did I do wrong? Why did this other guy go viral and not me? Did I fail to plant some seeds in the most obvious places? Or did this DrRonPaul2012 fellow have a huge head start on me? (He’s only got 61 YouTube subscribers, so I don’t think that alone could account for the rapid spread.)

Any ideas?

2002: Mitt Romney (R), 50%; Shannon O’Brien (D), 45%

1998: Paul Celluci (R), 51%; Scott Harshbarger (D), 47%

1994: Bill Weld (R), 71%; Mark Roosevelt (D), 28%

1990: Bill Weld (R), 50%; John Silber (R in D clothing), 47%

Democratic Governor Deval Patrick’s approval rating is currently around 42%, and this was the first open Senate seat in the state since John Kerry was elected in 1984.

So although it’s true that there are very few Republicans right now on Beacon Hill or Capitol Hill, let’s not pretend that this is equivalent to Barney Frank being elected senator from Utah. People who were expecting a Coakley cakewalk a month ago – myself included – were just not paying attention to some basic political facts.

A vote for Scott Brown is not a vote for real change. It’s a vote for no change. And somehow that seems to be what people want these days, even as they curse their present conditions.

It’s not just the Republicans anymore. Independents and even many Democrats seem to have decided that just about everything done or proposed by government is a bad idea. That includes all the ideas that were considered good ideas when recently proposed by candidates as opposed to actual officeholders. How else can we explain the huge shift in public opinion over the last few years? After giving the GOP “a thumping” in 2006 and 2008, we’re now turning against the people we brought in to replace them. A year after 60% of Massachusetts voters supported Obama, it now seems that a majority are going to vote to stop him from doing what he said he was going to do.

What is going on? What are people thinking? Are they thinking?

I can imagine a few reasons why a voter would just say no:

• Things are fine the way they are and are going to get better. [This view has been in the minority for years.]
• Things could be better, but anything the government tries to do about it will make it worse.
• Things could be better for other people, but that’s not my problem.
• Things could be better for me and/or other people if government did something, but I’m not willing to make other changes in my life necessary for the government’s plan to work.

I think the second position can be proven false by examining history, and it makes me sad to think that we as a society seem to have forgotten that government can be a good thing.

It also makes me sad that there are a lot of people holding the third position, but at least it’s a position that’s intellectually defensible if not politically correct. Fortunately, I think the number of people who truly feel this way is not large.

It’s the folks in the last group that are in some ways the scariest, particularly because I don’t think they fully comprehend what they’re saying or thinking. We’ve become a society that wants to lose weight without diet or exercise, get wealthier without adding value to anything, and get more of everything while spending less – especially from government.

I was a psychology major. I understand that resistance to change is part of the human psyche. But change is going to come whether you like it or not. The question is whether you want to make it happen or let it happen. Which camp are you in?

Subject: Mayoral term limits

To: Mark.Ciommo@cityofboston.gov, John.R.Connolly@cityofboston.gov, Michael.F.Flaherty@cityofboston.gov, Stephen.Murphy@cityofboston.gov, Sam.Yoon@cityofboston.gov

Cc: Maureen.Feeney@cityofboston.gov

Today I received an e-mail from the Committee to Elect Sam Yoon suggesting that I contact you regarding term limits for the Mayor of Boston.

While I am a fan and supporter of Mr. Yoon, I believe he is wrong on this issue. Job experience is a good thing. Officeholders who enjoy popular support should not be removed simply so someone else can have a turn. I understand that our campaign system presents high barriers to entry for newcomers, but they are not impenetrably high. A mayor who truly abuses his or her power or whose decisions are bad for the city can and will be removed by the voters.

Had it not been for term limits, the man elected President of the United States in 2000 would likely have been Bill Clinton rather than George W. Bush. Enough said.

David Schrag

Congressman, a large part of what’s wrong with the United States is the Senate itself. There are 15 states with populations under 2,000,000. These states represent less than 10% of the country’s population, yet they have 30% of the vote in the Senate. Even worse, Senate rules and/or traditions grant enormous power to individual senators, either as committee chairs or as potential filibuster participants. So we’re in a situation where a Senator who was elected with under 200,000 votes can singlehandedly thwart the efforts of a President who was elected by 67,000,000. We can’t do anything about the disproportionate power of small states without changing the Constitution, but we should be able to do something about the Senate rules and procedures.

My first question is whether you have a problem with the way power in the Senate is distributed and manipulated. If not, why not? If so, what would you try to do about it?

By the way, the last time this much damage was done to the word “faithfully” was in 1983.