Obama at the State House
Sunday 11/02/2008 3:52 PM
Alex and I were downtown by 9:30 am for the Obama rally. The gates were to open at 11 and the rally started at 1. I knew there'd be a line to get in, and when we made it a block away from the intersection where the State House is, I thought we'd have a long wait. And then I saw that the line was reaching around a corner, snaking around another block, and then stretching down Front Street for a couple of blocks. We were worried we might not make it in but were assured there would be plenty of room on the plaza at the State House. By the time the line started moving, we saw that it had snaked through several more city blocks -- snaked as in, it wrapped around three sides of each block. But they opened the gates early and we started moving forward about 20 minutes after we got our places in line. So here are some pictures of crowd:
To give you a better sense of what this meant for the wait, here's a map. We were at Front & Gay St. We wanted to get to the rally on the NW corner of Broad & High St. But first the line turned left on Broad, then left again on Wall, then right on Lynn, then right on High. When we got in line, we were at Elm & Front. When we made it to Lynn & High, we realized we'd been in the first third of the line:
And Alex in line at the beginning of our wait, eating Sun Chips:
Once we got closer to the entrance, we were met by state politicians, and I got Alex's picture with Dave Robinson:
Once we made it in, we realized that Alex wouldn't be able to see very well. But we found our way to a spot where I had a decent view and he could see the podium when he jumped up. As we were waiting, I noticed a lot of people pointing up to the sky behind us, and I thought there was an Obama copter in the sky, but I didn't see anything. At least not at first. Then I caught sight of several people on one of the roofs of a skyscraper across the street from the rally. I'd already spotted the security on the roof of the State House, but I could tell from the ground that these idiots weren't with the security staff. I assume they were just trying to get a good view of the rally, but it ended up starting 15 or 20 minutes late ... not until after these more official looking people came onto the roof above them:
Once they all went back inside, Michelle Obama came out to introduce Barack. I held 100+ pound Alex on my shoulders through her speech and for the first part of Obama's before I had to put him down. He got some great pictures while he was up there, though:
And then came Barack:
And unfortunately, here's where Alex spent the rest of the rally (his feet hurt after sitting on my shoulders all that time):
A few shots of the crowd as we were leaving (the guys on this roof are supposed to be there):
On our way out, as I was talking to Peter on the phone, I gave Alex $3 to pick something out from a vendor's table. I thought he'd come back with a button or a sticker, but he ended up with a deck of Obama Presidential Playing Cards ... he somehow talked the vendor down to selling them to him for $3 even though the guy was asking $15 (I'm not sure this is what Obama means when he says we oughta spread the wealth around):
And here are the first two cards he pulled out of the deck:
And one final snap of Alex before we hiked back to the car:
In other news, while Obama took over downtown Columbus, Sarah Palin held a rally in a hangar at Rickenbacker Airport outside of town. HA!
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