The last time I attended a presidential campaign rally was when Robert F. Kennedy was running. My memories of that evening some thirty years ago are quite similar to the scene I wrote of to friends and family a few weeks ago after attending a local rally for John Kerry, part of the Kerry-Edwards post-convention journey across the United States. At both rallies there were cheering crowds who had waited patiently for hours to hear the candidate speak, crowds that stretched from the stage up into the rafters of an arena. The chanting, the music, the stomping of feet in unison…all of it making some of us dare to hope.
In 1968, my dad and I waited three hours listening to the crowd chant “Sock it to ‘em, Bobby!”. A few weeks ago, the thousands gathered to hear Kerry did the wave to fill in the time between the speeches of local politicians and the arrival of John Kerry and his family. The chanting was there, but this time it was “No more Bush!” and variations of that theme.
Kerry’s rally was held on my campus and it seemed too great an opportunity to skip. If I had any hesitation about attending, it was due the subtle pressure some of us may have felt in these past few years, those of us who haven’t just fallen in line with the current administration’s ‘group think.’ How much more obvious could one be, showing up at a rally for someone who may bring an end to the Bush era in a place where the population is mostly apolitical or pro-Republican. But, in the end, I went and to my amazement, so did about 13,000 others.
The doors were supposed to open at 3pm and Kerry was to speak at 7pm. We didn't get to the arena until about 4:30, thinking by then, the crowd would have thinned and we could walk right in. Not a chance. Two lines stretched around the building, lines that were still hundreds of people strong. We stood in the afternoon heat for an hour on a day that also happened to be the hottest day of the year up until then. At 4:30pm it was 112-degrees, with no shade except the shadow of the person in line front of us. With one bottle of water ($3 apiece) we moved slowly to the stairs leading inside. Climbing the stairs was enough to make some of us pass out after standing in the heat for so long, even if it meant relief from the sun and heat. The cool air of the arena’s concourse seemed to last only a few seconds as we were herded into a large staging area of sorts. With thousands of bodies crowded into one confined space as we were, the cool and dark soon gave way to mutterings of "Kerry better win after all this we're going through for him!." I saw one person who had fainted being whisked away and, at that point, it seemed the rally staff gave up on any measure of security. They waved us through the metal detectors (gotta love our homeland security) and we finally were able to look for seats. It was 6pm and the arena was filled to the rafters.
It sounds like the party line but if I had to go by the people attending the rally, it’s not difficult to see why the Democratic party is perceived as all-inclusive. Seniors, college students, labor unions, teachers, minorities, all were represented. Looking around me I saw families with babies, retirees and workers wearing union t-shirts. Throughout Kerry’s speech, as cheers went up in response to those parts aimed directly at them, the different groups identified themselves. A phrase in Spanish drew applause from Latinos, senior citizens cheered when Kerry changed the subject to prescription drug costs, labor union members made their feelings clear when he spoke of the jobs lost and everyone cheered when Kerry reiterated that nuclear waste wouldn’t be dumped in our backyard.
Much of what we heard at the rally had already been said in Kerry’s acceptance speech a few weeks earlier at the Democratic National Convention in Boston, but the crowd didn’t seem to mind. The pundits say it was one of his best speeches, the one he gave at the convention. Personally, I didn’t think it was all that great. It had its moments but I wish Kerry had stopped and responded to the warmth and enthusiasm of the delegates. Especially when it seemed that they really liked what he was saying to them. He raced through that speech but in person, I felt he was more effective. There was no podium, no reading off of notes and not a single grammatical error in the entire speech. How refreshing.
Every four years, during convention season, I overdose on gavel-to-gavel coverage of the conventions. This year I will have to drop the plural because I don’t think I’ll be able to watch the other convention being held. Admittedly, that’s close-minded, but the way I see it, we have been living the Republican agenda for almost four years now and the other side took two of those years off, it seems.
Well, they made up for it in four days in Boston.
It’s old news now but I envy those who live in Illinois these days, those eligible to vote for Barak Obama who is running for a seat in the US Senate. If you haven't read or seen a video of Obama's speech, you missed what one [conservative] commentator called “history’ being made.
As I watched it on CSPAN, the cable network that provided convention watchers with unadulterated coverage, I wondered if it was just me. Did Obama’s words resonate because I’m also the child of an immigrant who came to the US to study? Could I relate more closely when he talked of having a funny sounding name for a kid growing up in America? Or was it just PMS that made the tears flow when he spoke of people being rounded up and detained, just because of their religion or ties to a particular part of the world? When the speech ended I quickly flicked channels to hear what the broadcasters were saying. “Electrifying.” “Amazing.” “A rising star.”
Okay, so it wasn’t just me. Newsweek magazine recently published an op-ed by Anne Quindlen in which she says she was cheering at his speech all alone in her living room that night. Me too. On my feet, clapping and crying. And from the letters published later by Newsweek, Anne and I weren’t alone. Well, we were but a whole bunch of us were celebrating alone that night in front of our televisions.
Watching Obama, I felt he spoke to those of us in the US who are the children of immigrants. Call it naive but when Obama talked about growing up with hope, "The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that America has a place for him, too,“ he seemed to be speaking to me (okay, so I wasn’t always a skinny kid). Naively, many of us don’t or didn’t question our “American-ness”, especially those of us who were born in the US. But, it hasn’t been that simple these past few years. There are Americans and then there are patriotic Americans. There are rights we all enjoy as US citizens and then there are those that can be taken away from some citizens. I’ve said often since hearing Obama’s speech that he seems to get it. It’s not black and white (nor red and blue) and what happens to others, may and often does affect so many more. "If there’s an Arab American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties."
At the end of the Kerry rally, the music and confetti made it feel as if we had just finished our own mini-convention. As I walked out of the arena I saw voter registration booths crowded with people who had just heard not only Kerry but a dozen other politicians, mostly local, speak. Maybe they were thinking about hope also. Maybe like me, they too are feeling, as I heard someone say recently, cautiously optimistic, as the summer comes to an end.
reeta
Text of Barack Obama's speech at the Demoratic National Convention