Obama Visits Union, Missouri

Obama visited the small town of Union, Missouri yesterday. It was his last stop on a one-day, three-stop tour of rural Missouri; he held Town Hall meetings in Springfield and Rolla before ending at a barbeque in Union City Park.

It was a dismal day for a barbeque. As I drove from St. Louis through rain so heavy it looked like a thick gray fog, I half expected the event to be canceled. The email I'd received from my Obama campaign contact inviting me to cover the event as press had noted the gathering would be outdoors.

I arrived half an hour late after 60 miles practically skating through water on the highway. I'd missed the press equipment set-up. It really didn't matter, though. I had nothing to set up. The only equipment I'd brought was a pen and a point-and-shoot digital camera. Anchors and crew from several local TV stations stood huddled in the downpour, ponchos over stiff suits, frowns under umbrellas. The campaign volunteers looked much more jovial, if tired. The event was still on. It has been moved from the park lawn to a pavilion. Obama was on his way.

Already, two and a half hours before show time, a small crowd of ticket holders was forming outside a security perimeter, waiting in line to be searched by the Secret Service.

Across the street from the park, a group of UAW members were holding a demonstration, protesting the announced closure of a nearby Chrysler plant. Many of them wore Obama pins or t-shirts.

 

Farther down the same street, a group of McCain supporters were shouting "NObama!" but in all that rain, it was hard to tell that they weren't just chanting "Obama!" You could tell their allegiance by the signs they held, which read:

ARMY VET FOR MCCAIN

HEY, OBAMA, WHERE'S OUR FREE ROCK CONCERT, BRAUTS (sic), AND BEER? EUROPE??

LATINO'S (sic) FOR OBAMA

GUNS DON'T KILL BABY'S (sic) OBAMA DOES

and

ALLS WE CAN SPEAK IS ENGLISH? AND THAT'S SO BAD??????

Yes, I am serious about every single of those signs. Even that last one:

Sometimes reality beats satire.

After about half an hour standing in the rain, the press got the green light to enter the main pavilion. I let a TV anchor from St. Louis go ahead of me in the Secret Service search line, because she had a laptop with her that was getting rained on, and I was afraid it would short. She didn't thank me. She just sort of tossed her eerily-perfect-despite-the-rain hair in my general direction. I'm sure she thought I was somebody's intern.

It was strange for me to be behind the press ropes. I've covered a lot of political gatherings and campaign events before, but usually as a citizen journalist, from the audience. I talked to a group of folks from a local small-town newspaper. They were all about my age, and they seemed genuinely pleased, maybe even, if I wasn't imagining it, a little excited to meet a blogger, which I didn't expect from print writers. They offered to let me share their still photo riser.

The pavilion began to fill up with Obama's audience. I talked to some people in the crowd. It was hard to talk to many, because the press were restricted to an area behind a rope, so I  had to kind of wait for people to walk by near the rope and try to catch someone's attention. Everyone I talked to was an Obama supporter. That didn't surprise me. I'd seen on the local television news that people had lined up for blocks hours before the ticket distribution center opened to try for a spot at the barbeque. There had only been 200 tickets to the event, and they'd run out in less than an hour.

A young man I spoke with told me that he was a native of the area, but had been working out of town; he'd driven all the way from Indianapolis the day before to wait in line for a ticket, and had gotten the very last one.

An older woman I spoke with mentioned that there hadn't been a presidential candidate speaking in Union since Truman. Then she asked me if I read Daily Kos.

This retiree spends her days reading Daily Kos.

And looking age-defyingly awesome in Obama t-shirts.

When I asked about issues, most of the people I spoke with were primarily concerned about the local economy. A local woman named Carol told me quite earnestly that she worried area families would suffer terribly from the imminent Chrysler job cuts. She told me that, aside from the jobs lost to shift cutbacks and the factory closure, her union estimates 15,000 additional Missouri jobs depend on business created by the Chrysler factory. She asked me to mention that 15,000 figure specifically on my blog. (Here you go, Carol. Here's hoping someone at Chrysler listens.)

Then Obama's tour bus arrived.

And the big guns of the press sprang into action. Shouting and shoving each other out of the way, demanding all sorts of unreasonable things from the Obama staff, pretending not to hear the Secret Service, refusing to take turns or wait in line for anything, essentially resembling a pack of wild dogs. Everyone wanted the very first shot of Obama stepping off of the bus.

(Whereas, I was like, Dude, there are eleventy frillion photos of Obama doing EVERYTHING already, all over the internet. What shot are you going to get that wins you a Pulitzer? Especially since it's dark and dank and pouring down rain, and we're in a poorly lit park pavilion?)

The big guns pretty much ignored me since I didn't have anyone following me around with a camera the size of a small child. So I manged to slip through the fray to get this fabulous photo of Obama's arrival, from a distance, through the rain, with my little point-and-shoot:

See him there? Between the hats? Oooooh, yeah. Pulitzer, here I come!

After getting off the bus, Obama actually went around to the area with the protesters across the street before coming up to the pavilion. I really wish I could have seen that interaction, but it all happened behind the bus. The paparazzi mainstream media photographers standing next to me were practically frothing at the mouth at not being allowed outside the security zone to get a shot of Obama walking past the people with the pro-McCain signs.

Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill gave Obama a glowing introduction, saying, among other things:

I just want to speak from my heart, just for a minute [. . .] I know this man. He is humble. He is a devout Christian. He loves his family. He has overcome obstacles that many of us cannot even fathom to be at this place, at this moment.

Obama looked genuinely abashed at her praise. I've seen him put his head down when people praise him before, but this was the closest I had ever been to him during an introduction, and I was impressed by how sincerely embarrassed he looked. From 25 feet away, I didn't see any sign of that presumption the McCain campaign keeps going on about.

He looked like a kid getting praised by his mother in front of a school assembly.

Obama gave a fairly standard but well-received stump speech, with some local color thrown in. He delivered a few shots against recent attacks by the McCain campaign, including a reference to John McCain's new "Celeb" ad:

I mean, you haven't heard a positive thing out of that campaign in a month. All they do is try to run me down. And you know this in your own life, right? If somebody doesn't have anything nice to say about anybody, that means they've got some problems of their own.

So, they know they've got no new ideas. They know they're dredging up all the stale old stuff they've been peddling for the past eight, ten years. But, since they don't have any new ideas, the only strategy they've got in this election is to try to scare you about me.

They're gonna try to say that I'm a risky guy. They're gonna try to say, well, you know, he's got a funny name. And he doesn't look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills. And they're gonna send out nasty emails.

You know, the latest one, they've got me in an ad with Paris Hilton!

He followed this deconstruction of the latest Republican attacks with what I felt was the most striking and effective moment of his speech in Union:

Let me tell you something: when we are in such dire straits economically, when our foreign policy has gotten so messed up, what's the bigger risk-- choosing change? Or choosing to do the same things that got us into this mess in the first place?

Union, that is the real risk-- is that we miss this moment. That we miss this time. That we decide we're not going to go ahead and do what is needed, because we're afraid. That can't be what we do this time, because that's not what's built America. That's not what has made this country great. We've never shied away. We've never been fearful of the future. We've always reached out to the future. And so when people are looking to the past, we say, no, we're going forward. We are gonna create a better America.

That's what this election is about.

A local reporter, Jason from washmo.com, shot this excellent video of the entire speech:

Then came the moment the crowd was really waiting for: Obama shaking hands.

And serving hamburgers and hot dogs to the event volunteers:

A man in the serving line gave Obama a union hat and he put it on and posed for a photo with the man who had given it to him. Obama made a point of thanking each one of the event volunteers personally as they walked by in the line.

I was really as close to Obama as my photo makes it look I was while he was serving food to the crowd. The staff had roped off an impromptu press box right next to the serving window. I had MOMocrats pins with me in my purse, and I really wanted to shake Barack Obama's hand, offer a pin to him, and ask him to give one to Michelle. I wanted to tell him I voted for him in the primary, and plan to vote for him again in the general (eeeeeven after FISA). I wanted to tell him that the grassroots movement his campaign has inspired has moved me to feel more hopeful about politics than I have been in years.

But Barack Obama wasn't there to talk to me. I was there as press. And Obama wasn't talking to the press that day. He was talking to the people of Union, Missouri.

And at least 200 residents of Union seemed to be quite eager to hear what he had to say.

Jaelithe also writes at The State of Discontent. Her preschool-aged son endorsed Obama before she did.

Comments

[jen]

this is a fantastic recap, J.

[cynematic]

Thanks for bringing us along with you on that vivid and rainy trip to Union, MO.

Looks like he was serving extra well-done burgers that day! :)

Next time, look or ask for his "body man" Reggie and have Reggie get the MOMocrats pin to him.

[jaelithe]

I totally saw Reggie!

Next to the tour bus. Outside the security line. He was never anywhere near anywhere I could have hit him up with a pin, sadly.

[Jim]

Thank you for sharing you impressions of the event. I especially liked your comment, "He looked like a kid getting praised by his mother in front of a school assembly."

The Republicans took over from Hillary calling Obama an elitist. The arrogant charges have accelerated since his Iraq, Europe trip, even though McCain took the same trip in March 2008.

It seems like most people come away very impressed after hearing Obama in person.

Obama needs Missouri!

[Donna]

Excellent reporting, Jaelithe - I really feel like I was there in the soggy press area with you! LOVE the shot of the misspelled signs.

[April]

Thanks so much for giving us this inside view. You seemed to be walking the line between "press" and "people" so it was nice to kind of see it from both of those perspectives. It made Obama seem more....real, I guess would be the best way to put it.

I stumbled the article.

And those signs. I don't get it. What does speaking English have to do with anything? That's as bad as the stuff my anti-Obama relatives send me in emails. (Notice I said "anti-Obama" and not "pro-McCain". They never send me anything singing the praises of John McCain, its just always about bashing Barack.)

[cynematic]

April, I think the Obama-basher's sign was referring to something he said weeks ago about bilingual or even multilingual ability being a positive. I can't believe they want to hold that against him, or anyone else.

Just think of the job possibilities that open up if you speak another language.

[Lynne]

My daughter found your post today on Obama's trip to Union and sent it to me, as I'm the older woman you talked to. I do appreciate that you mentioned that I was "age defyingly awesome"; that's a description I'll hold dear, believe me!

Just got back from my volunteering at our local office. Verizon was there wiring eight phone lines for eventual phonebanking. The guys said they had been at offices all over the state over the past week or so and were heading to more in central Missouri tomorrow. By the way, the Verizon guys were pro-Obama.

Again, thanks for the compliment!!

[Deb Donatti]

Thank you for your great account of the day I will be kicking myself for missing forever.
I am originally from Union, graduated from Union High in the 80's and was so thrilled that he choose Union to visit.
I wanted to bring my husband and kids to see some history in action, but especially my little boy.
My 4 yr old son (adopted) is Kenyan/American, and unfortunatly we could not make it because we were in a nearby town attending the fair Little Miss & Mr.contest at the same time ( in which my son & his sister were both entered.)
I would have loved my children to see Obama, but especially my son. Now I can say to him, with some real edvidence, that he too can dream of running for president if he wants some day. Now I (finally) have some hope myself.