Obama Rally

We attended a rally for President Obama this evening on the Pentacrest of the University of Iowa. I had gotten tickets easily yesterday (there were clandestine places around town where non-students could get tickets without standing in a long line (students had to stand in long lines the day before)). The gates opened at 1 p.m. for what was hoped to be a 4 p.m. appearance by Obama, his wife, Michele, VP Biden, and his wife, Jill. At 1 p.m. I watched Obama wind up a speech in New Hampshire. There was no way he was going to be in Iowa until 5 p.m. Besides, there was rain going through mid-afternoon. I was not going to stand out in the rain. My wife was in a meeting downtown until about 4 p.m., and she walked over from there. The rain had stopped. She called while standing in a line a couple of blocks long, though moving quickly. I waited until I’d heard the president’s plane had landed, then walked down to campus. There was virtually no line when I got there, after 5 p.m., though it was (as expected) crowded once inside the gates. I called my wife and found her not too far from where I’d entered. A couple of women behind us said they’d been there since 2 p.m. but had lost their place closer to the stage when they had gone to the port-o-potty. They asked if we could move a bit so they could see. We did, though I told them they wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway. And that was the case. Biden came on first and gave a brief introduction to Obama. Then Obama came on and gave a 30-minute speech. We couldn’t see either Biden or Obama, made all the more difficult by people holding up signs or cameras or children. At one point I tried to take a picture with my iPhone, holding it up over the crowd in front of me, but all that came out was the backs of the heads of the crowd in front of me. The speech was pretty much boilerplate, with Iowa and Iowans inserted where this morning it had been New Hampshire and New Hampsireites. Tomorrow it will be another state. The sound was loud, though echoed off the walls of the buildings, so occasionally wasn’t intelligible. But that didn’t matter. At the end of Obama’s speech, Michele and the Bidens joined him onstage, and I think I caught a glimpse of their backs for maybe a quarter of a second, and that only because I recognized the color of the dresses Michele and Jill were wearing at the New Hampshire rally earlier that I’d seen on TV (blue and green, respectively). But I didn’t go to see the candidates or wives or hear the speeches. I was just interested in the spectacle – the crowd, the staff, the hawkers of buttons and caps and t-shirts, the media, the security (helicopters overhead, black cars with flashing lights, secret service on top of buildings with binoculars and guns, secret service roaming the crowd, unobtrusive in their stiff demeanor, dark suits, and earpieces). Political rallies are theater. More like Shakespeare’s theater, though, than contemporary theater: The most interesting things are happening outside and around the stage, not on it. The crowd and the setting and the just being there are the reasons for being there.