Yup, I was there. I’d never been to a big campaign rally before and I decided that, as an Illinois resident, yesterday might be my last chance. I’m glad I went. It was exciting, but even more than that, I’m glad I saw how the whole thing works. I’ll have a better idea now of just what goes into an event like that. First of all, the security. My heart sank when I saw the line to get in circling around and around many city blocks. But it moved very quickly, and the guards were both extremely efficient and extremely thorough getting us through the metal detectors and bag check. I finally understood just how hard it would be for someone with ill intent to get up to something at one of these rallies. And the snipers in the photo? Yeah. There was one guy on the roof right abut us though whose sole job was to spot people in the crowd who had collapsed and direct people to go help. With a crowd standing three hours and more in the hot sun with little water, that happened often.
Obama was low key and Biden was wonderful — impassioned, articulate (not to say clean), and a great wingman. But you can read about that elsewhere. Being in the crowd is such a different experience from seeing it on TV. First of all, you have no sense of how big the whole crowd really is. All you can see is your own tiny part of it. And there was a lot of booing when they talked abut Bush and McCain. Did that come through on TV? I never heard it before. You see how chants begin and spread through the crowd. But the most striking thing of all that I learned was that when you attend a rally like that, you’re not there to hear a speech and learn about a candidate (we could hear perfectly, though we couldn’t see much). The audience at a rally isn’t an audience at all. It is part of the spectacle, part of the performance for the real viewers, who are sitting at home. And we performed our hearts out.
Thank goodness for my little zoom lens or my photos would be even more pointless than they are now. But I had to post this one because you can see Michelle, and I <3 Michelle. We were hoping they’d walk down to our end of the stage, but they didn’t. The event started right on time and went very quickly. I think they knew they couldn’t leave all of out there in that heat for much longer.
Perhaps the coolest thing about being there was I got to be one of the first in the country to get an Obama/Biden sign. They were still warm and the ink scent was strong when they pulled them out of boxes to pass them to us, literally hot off the press. We had dinner in Champaign, and you could tell which waiters had made the trip to Springfield by their sunburns. We had sunburns too, but those will fade. The sign is in my window.
