Just how many audience members shouted bad things at Palin's speeches?

[David Bernstein]

According to the links in Frank Rich's NY Times op-ed on the subject, the
grand total is four.  Not only would responding to the kooks just give them
additional attention and encourage more kookiness, there's no way of knowing
if people who shout obnoxious things about opponents at campaign rallies
within earshot of the media are really your supporters, or plants sent by
the opposing campaign to make the other side's supporters look like kooks. 

-----Original Message-----
From: conlawprof-bounces at lists.ucla.edu
[mailto:conlawprof-bounces at lists.ucla.edu] On Behalf Of Volokh, Eugene
Sent: Monday, October 13, 2008 6:44 PM
To: CONLAWPROF at lists.ucla.edu
Subject: Just how many audience members shouted bad things at Palin's
speeches?

    Let me touch on this again for a moment, since some are faulting
Palin for her failure to react to what audience members shouted:  Does
anyone have a relatively precise head count of the people who have
shouted "kill him," "traitor," "off with his head," etc. at Palin's
speeches?  I would think this would be relevant to whether Palin should
feel some obligation to respond.  We generally aren't expected to
denounce a lone kook, it seems to me, just because he is one of the many
thousands of people in our audience.  So do we know how many such people
there were, or whether there was document crowd cheering for what some
of the kooks were doing?

    It's also not clear that we need to denounce even four kooks at
our speeches; perhaps their being in the audience to the speech
distinguishes them from mere supporters, such as the four who wore the
"Sarah Palin is a cunt" T-shirts (at least one seems to have said she
was an Obama supporter, and I take it the others probably agree), but
I'm not sure how important the distinction is.  Still, it would be good
to get a sense of the actual number of bad audience members involved.

    Eugene

    
Michael Kent Curtis writes:

    All of which leaves me where I began, the tenuous and baseless
attribution of sympathy with terror to Obama--implicit in the pals
around with terrorists (plural) charge --is subversive of the
presumption of loyalty--and the idea of loyal opposition--that is basic
to democracy.  I would have a similar reaction to claims that McCain
pals around with terrorists.  The failure of Palin to discountenance
cries of kill him, traitor, off with his head etc. during her
speeches--but to go right on with no comment and no comment even after
she must have later read about them in the Post's report and elsewhere
is distressing and subversive of constitutional government.  When a
member of the audience suggests that the opposing candidate should be
killed and is a traitor we have a right to expect a response.  I don't
recall cries of kill him before in presidential campaigns--now or in the
past-but it is true that charges that are inconsistent with the
presumption of loyal opposition have been made before.  They were
disreputable then, and they are now.
     

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