Right in Their Face: College Republicans Rally in Berkeley
BERKELEY — Borrowing a page from this city's radical traditions, a boisterous band of 200 college Republicans demonstrated Saturday in the bastion of American liberalism, staging a pro-Bush administration rally on the UC Berkeley campus and leading a flag-waving procession down Telegraph Avenue.
As street vendors and merchants looked on in disbelief, delegates attending a state college Republican convention here marched two blocks to People's Park, site of a widely publicized protest incident in 1969, where they chanted "Bush! Bush! Bush!" and sang "America the Beautiful."
By Berkeley standards, it was a minuscule procession played out on a balmy Saturday afternoon on a mostly deserted campus. But to the hardy corps of young Republicans, uniting under the theme "Behind Enemy Lines," it was a highly symbolic event. Even grizzled political warriors said they were impressed by participants' moxie. Longtime Berkeley professors said it represented a political drift to the right at California's pioneer state university.
"I never dreamed in my lifetime that I would see this," said a buoyant Shawn Steel, former state Republican Party chairman from Rolling Hills.
Steel described the three-day convention attended by 285 delegates from 25 state campuses as "the latest manifestation of how the campuses of California are changing, particularly here at Berkeley." Campuses represented included UCLA, USC, UC Santa Barbara and most of the important state institutions.
Adopting tactics perfected during the 1964 Free Speech movement and countless demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, the growing band of campus conservatives hoped for a confrontation with what they view as the dominant leftist political orthodoxy of UC Berkeley and other campuses.
A rally on the storied steps of Sproul Hall Saturday afternoon provided the perfect setting. GOP speakers, standing where Free Speech leader Mario Savio and antiwar activist Tom Hayden once held forth, praised President Bush and the war effort in Iraq as students waved American flags and carried placards reading "Give War a Chance" and "Bomb France."
Predictably, this provoked a hostile reaction from activists in nearly permanent residence at Sproul Plaza, some of whom heckled the demonstrators.
When a Berkeley resident Matthew Strickland, 33, an electrician, ridiculed their efforts, several collegians descended on him to engage him in debate, asking him if he opposed American troops in Iraq.
