Million Mom Mush

FOR YOUR AVERAGE "mild-mannered suburban mom," as CBS dubbed her last fall, Donna Dees-Thomases sure knows how to throw a party. There are several tens of thousands of protesters on the national Mall this Mother's Day for the Million Mom March she has organized (the exact figure will be endlessly disputed). On the main stage, with the U.S. Capitol as backdrop, celebrities are preaching the gospel of handgun registration, gun-owner licensing, and mandatory trigger locks. Rosie O'Donnell, the talk-show-host-turned-gun-controller is emceeing. Lesbian rocker Melissa Etheridge, folkie Emmylou Harris, and grunge widow Courtney Love all take a turn at the mike, as do actresses old (Susan Sarandon) and young (Reese Witherspoon). Even Hillary Rodham Clinton drops by for a while. As some kids are singing on the family stage, others swoop down the giant fun slide. The whole thing resembles a small carnival under a gorgeous blue sky. It's public relations gold.

But of course this should come as no surprise. Dees-Thomases, as you probably didn't learn from the heavy network coverage, is a pro; she's worked as a publicist for both CBS anchor Dan Rather and late night host David Letterman. According to the official myth of the Million Mom March, doggedly clung to by most of the media, the event was the brain-child of a typical suburban housewife, spurred to action by a brief flash of political awareness following last August's shooting at the North Valley Jewish Community Center near Los Angeles. But as Fox News Channel and the conservative Media Research Center tirelessly pointed out in the week leading up to the march, Dees-Thomases was anything but typical. And not just because of her background in PR.

For all the talk of the march being a "grass-roots" event, it is closer in spirit to the filming of a glossy political ad. If the Dees-Thomases name rings a bell, that's because she is the sister-in-law of Susan Thomases, who may be Hillary Clinton's closest political crony. Herself a New Jersey resident, Donna Dees-Thomases has contributed twice already to Mrs. Clinton's New York Senate campaign, and her husband Jeffrey has pitched in with a third donation. In the early 1980s, Mrs. Dees-Thomases worked for two Democratic senators from her native Louisiana. And while one of her favorite soundbites is to say that before last fall, "I didn't know the Brady Bill from the Brady Bunch," Dees-Thomases was Dan Rather's publicist throughout the 1992 political season, during which candidate Bill Clinton took to task President George Bush for failing to support the Brady Bill.

In fact, the march is political from top to bottom. The Mall is awash in Gore 2000 stickers. Both the president and first lady address the gathering in video statements from an earlier meeting with a group of moms at the White House. The Expo Tent, home to "Million Mom March Endorsing Organizers," features a buffet of liberal advocacy groups: the Feminist Majority, Ceasefire, and Common Cause. The Common Cause booth showcases a poster with opposing pictures of Charlton Heston and a bubbly little girl running through a field of flowers. Heston: "He wants to avoid getting hassled at gun shows. He's backed by special interest money." The little girl: "She wants to come home from school safely. She only has you." You and -- according to the march's list of sponsors and donors -- Guess jeans and Dannon yogurt and Oprah Winfrey's Oxygen.com and Planet Hollywood and Virgin Atlantic Airways, among others.

That little girl, and all the gun-control advocates assembled on the Mall, are backed by millions of dollars in corporate sponsorships. But widespread knowledge of that money, not to mention Dees-Thomases's background as a promoter with White House pull, would have spoiled the atmosphere of us-against-the-world activism. While Rosie decries the National Rifle Association's "blood money" and says bitterly of gun-rights supporters, "It is about money, not amendments," her image is broadcast on giant television screens dotting the Mall, which don't come cheap.

As the Million Moms march in place in front of the Capitol, another event -- this one truly on a shoestring budget -- draws a few thousand Bill of Rights enthusiasts to demonstrate against stricter gun control. Tucked into a corner of the Mall at 17th Street and Constitution Avenue, the Second Amendment Sisters have no fun slide and no celebrities (unless you count Judicial Watch's Larry Klayman). And they have no money, relatively speaking (they refused to ask the NRA for funds). Keynote speaker Suzanna Gratia Hupp, a Texas state representative whose parents were shot and killed by a crazed gunman in a Texas restaurant in front of her (she had left her gun in the car), urged her listeners to be patient with the media, imploring, "The press is your friend."

But it's not, really. Organizers of the Second Amendment Sisters rally know that they are underdogs. With the Million Mom March generating so much favorable publicity, they can take no chances. So their website instructs marchers: "Conduct yourself as you would if you were a guest in someone's home. Please don't try to pick fights or be confrontational. . . . Give the public a chance to see that we gun owners are not the stereotypical buffoons the media [have] made us out to be." And just to make sure of that last point: "Please, no camouflage, gas masks -- and please, NO EMPTY HOLSTERS."

The Million Moms need no such advice. Organizers expect them to arrive without paramilitary gear, and they aren't let down. But the attendance has to be considered a letdown, though the leaders of the march have been dampening the expectations raised by their own name for weeks. Dozens of news organizations in the days after the event will credulously pass along the Million Moms' inflated estimate of 750,000 marchers. The Hundred Thousand Moms is probably more like it. The National Park Service no longer provides official crowd tallies of Washington marches, preferring to stay out of the middle of thankless arguments. But the grass-roots truth-squadders who populate the Web these days quickly provide conclusive photographic proof that the 750,000 figure is ludicrous -- with side-by-side comparisons of the Mother's Day crowd photos and aerial photos from the October 1997 Promise Keepers march, which all agree exceeded 500,000 and which, unlike the Moms, was standing room only from the Washington Monument to the Capitol.

What does this prove? Only that Donna Dees-Thomases and her fellow moms don't have to wonder whether the press is their friend. On the whole, it is.

Edmund Walsh is a staff assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.