Especially when you are dealing with the size crowds at the Capitol concert, there’s a huge difference between pouring rain and thunder/lightning, which is what the DC area has been experiencing tonight. Had there been thunder/lighting in ‘01, that concert would have been canceled, too.
Under the circumstances it is not a ‘timid response’ any more than moving Reagan’s 2nd swearing-in indoors and canceling all related events because it was ‘too cold.’ Sometimes nature just calls the shots.
That makes me feel better, to be quite honest. I had assumed that lightning was just as much in the forecast or in evidence back then, as it usually is during an East Coast late-afternoon July rainstorm.