Joel emailed everyone in our family a few days ago asking if any of us wanted to attend today’s “Stand for Change” Barack Obama rally at Reunion Arena. Jenna’s boyfriend, who is visiting from Germany, has been particularly interested in our Presidential campaign, so I brought up the email and asked if everyone had seen it. Jens and Jenna really wanted to go, but Jenna had class, and of course Ali also had class, and Steve had work. I, on the other hand, had no excuse. Joel, Blake, and Zoe picked the two of us up a little after 9:00 a.m. and we headed to the rally.
We had a little trouble finding the parking ramp entrance, but once there, we found plenty of parking on the 4th level. We were there before 10:30, when the doors were to open, so no problem. However, we descended to the 1st floor to find a line of people snaking around the parking garage, outside, and beyond — and wondered how much earlier those before us had arrived. At first, it was difficult to see the end of the line because it snaked around so much, but we eventually found our spot and in no time there were hundreds of people behind us. We stood nearly 2 hours before moving any substantial distance, and then suddenly we were speed-walking to catch up.
Yeah! We were finally in! — in the nosebleed section, but still with a pretty good view. Later we learned that somewhere in the range of 17,000 people were there.
DMN Photos | WFAA Brady Blog | Speech Excerpts | Speech Replay
Zoe was a real trooper. None of us had ever been to a campaign rally before, and I’m very glad we all got to go.
UPDATE (Feb. 22): From the Dallas Morning News:
The Barack Obama political road show that hit Dallas on Wednesday had the look and feel of a rock concert, right down to the cavernous venue – Reunion Arena – and the 17,000-plus folks he attracted, not to mention the thousands who were turned away.
The Clinton event could easily have been mistaken for a high school pep rally, sans the pompoms. There were no long lines – just a few hundred frozen noses pointed toward a Mariachi band and a table loaded with free coffee and burritos.
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